[Samba] With a Samba 3 PDC, can I promote a Samba BDC to become new PDC?

[Jeff McWilliams]

I'm helping out a small office upgrade their NT 4 PDC to Samba.  It's a small
office of 6 people, so tdbsam is being used. They keep having tape backup
issues
and other problems, so one of the reasons for the Samba migration is to allow
me
to SSH into their box and remotely administer it from home on
evenings/weekends.



Currently I'm testing the move using two dummy machines, and some Windows 2000
clients running under VMWare.

Following the Samba Guide, my plan was as follows:

Existing Windows NT machine is called DellDC.
Temporary machine is called TempDC

1.  Create a Linux based, Samba BDC named TempDC that joins the NT domain, then
following the instructions in chapters 5 and 8 of the Samba-Guide,  vampire the
accounts database off of DellDC and promote TempDC to a PDC.

2.  Shutdown DellDC, and reload with Linux, configuring Samba as a BDC. 
Following the same approach, re-join DellDC to NT domain as a BDC, and using 
net rpc vampire, vampire accounts database off of TempDC and promote DellDC to
PDC.

3.  Shutdown TempDC for good.


In my simulation environment, I created a similar set of machines.  One is NT
4.0 server and the other is Debian Linux (testing, sarge) with the latest Samba

3.0.4.  My samba configuration files are almost exactly as shown in the
Samba-Guide with the exception of printer shares and the fictional shared
folders.

Step 1 goes fine.  I was able to join TempDC to the domain hosted by NT4 on
DellDC, vampire the accounts off of DellDC, and promote TempDC to Primary DC
status.   After this I turned off DellDC and reloaded it with Debian Linux and
Samba.

Step 2 fails.   I reload DellDC with Linux, and successfully join the domain. 
Groupmaps are successfully created as directed in the guide, as before.  I even
made sure /etc/passwd and /etc/group are the same on both the Linux PDC and the
Linux BDC that I'm trying to promote.  However, 'net rpc vampire' fails. 
 
The output is: 
DellDC:/etc/samba# net rpc vampire -S TempDC 
Fetching DOMAIN database
Failed to fetch domain database: NT_STATUS_UNSUCCESSFUL


Is there another approach or did I configure something incorrectly?  Given a
successfully running Samba 3.0 PDC using tdbsam, how can I migrate the PDC
responsibilities from the existing Linux box to another?

I'd imagine this scenario comes up often as people upgrade server
hardware on PDCs without losing all the existing domain settings.   

Can anyone help me? 

Many thanks,

Jeff McWilliams

-- 
Jeff McWilliams: Jeff.McWilliams at clanmcwilliams.org

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