[Samba] Re: Moving premises, new server at new building

[jamrock]

"Michael Heydon" <michaelh at jaswin.com.au> wrote in message
news:4A0B63CC.1080900 at jaswin.com.au...
> Hi all,
>
> Our company is looking at moving premises some time next year, the plan
> at the moment is to have a new server room with all new servers set up
> at the new building prior to moving the workstations over. I'm wondering
> if anyone has done anything like this and what the best way to proceed is.
>
> We are using an LDAP backend. I am not completely averse to unix UIDs
> changing (although I would rather they didn't), I *REALLY* don't want to
> have to manually rejoin everyone to the domain though.
>
> We have two internet connections at the old building, one is slow and
> cheap, the other is faster and relatively expensive. The connection at
> the new building will be fast and cheap. So it would be possible to sync
> data between systems in the lead up to the change over as long as it
> wasn't too much data.
>

All the user/computer names and passwords are stored in your LDAP directory.
I would take the following approach.

Make sure the new server is not on the network.  You do not want two
machines with the same Netbios name on a network.

Install LDAP on a new machine

Install Samba on a new machine.

Copy across your smb.conf file to the new server

Use the net setlocalsid command to set the SID to the same one used by the
existing Samba machine.  See Managing Security Identifiers in the Official
How To.

Use the smbldap tools to create your intial LDAP entries.

Export your existing LDAP directory to a ldif file.  You may want to remove
the intial LDAP entries created by the smbldap tools.

Import your existing LDAP directory into LDAP on the new server.

You should now have a duplicate of your existing server.  You should not
need to re-add the machines to the network.

I used this approach when I needed to re-install my domain controller from
scratch.  Let us know if it works.