[Samba] Re: Migrating from NT4 to Samba/LDAP - Demoting PDC to domain member

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Fri Apr 8 08:09:17 GMT 2005


On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 09:21 +0200, Alan Dodd wrote:
> Ian Clancy wrote:
> > Hello All,
> > I'm looking for some advice \ shared past experiences of users on the list.
> > I am in the process of planning a migration from an existing NT Domain to
> > a Samba 3 / LDAP based domain. However, the existing NT4 PDC is also home
> > to our Exchange 5.5 email server which we would like to keep in service.
> > I imagine what i need to do is add the old NT4 PDC server to the new Samba
> > Domain once i have completed the migration. I am not sure how to do this
> > ?. I have found this software (U Promote ) at
> > http://www.purenetworking.net/Products/UPromote/UPromote.htm that may do
> > the trick.
> > Has anyone out there performed a task similar to this or used this product
> > ? or is it even necessary. Is there another (free) way ?.
> > Thanks,
> > Ian Clancy
> 
> UPromote worked flawlessly on a machine with NT4 SP6 and Oracle (no 
> exchange server), demoting it from PDC when I set up new domain with 
> samba PDC, 50 users.
> It was -much- easier and faster then having to call the Oracle staff to 
> perform a complete re-install of Oracle after having re-installed NT4!
> We had a down time of approx 15 minutes.
> For safety, beforehand I performed a mirror backup of the system HD just 
> in case anything went wrong.
> We bought a license of upromote specific to one server (it is bound to 
> the server name).
> Note that the NT4 was just installed as PDC in the first place, but no 
> workstation was joined to its domain, the network up to that moment was 
> peer to peer.
> Now we have roaming profiles, netlogons etc, but this was all done AFTER 
> demoting the NT server, and only with samba, so I don't know if there 
> could be issues specific to upromote in un-joining the workstations from 
> your NT4 PDC, and I have no experience of exchange.
> Also note that the domain name I gave to the new samba server was 
> different from the old domain name of the NT4 PDC - to be on the safe side.
----
I'll second that - I've used UPromote a couple of times to 'demote' a
'retired' NT 4 PDC to a member server. Worked great - alas - not free.

Craig



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