[Samba] NT4 PDC w/Exchange 5.5 migration

[Gaiseric Vandal]

On 03/27/12 12:49, Chris Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Chris Weiss<cweiss at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> to clarify, this sounds kind of like you are running exchange on the PDC?
> Indeed.
>
>> you can't demote an NT4 PDC to a stand alone or member server, it
>> requires a re-install.
> Officially, yes. In reality, no. Changing ProductType (under
> HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions) from LanmanNT to
> ServerNT accomplishes this.
>
>> Also, has upgrading exchange or migrating to something else been
>> considered, like zimbra or Kerio (which is what i use now) that's
>> still Outlook friendly but more flexible?
> There's a custom Exchange/Outlook app that eventually needs to be replaced.
>
> The procedure is only a temporary fix to allow new Win7 workstations
> to join the domain, albeit they wont be able to use the latest version
> of Outlook.
>
> Chris

So presumably you would use the net vampire command to extract all the 
account info from the NT server.    The samba server is then a BDC, you 
then promote it to a PDC and make the NT server a BDC (or even a member 
server.)    Since you have to keep the NT4 server as a DC anyway, I 
don't see how temporarily making it a member server helps anything.  I 
wouldn't count on being able to join it back to a Samba 3.5.x 
domain.     And then your Windows 7 machines run a good chance of trying 
to authenticate to the NT4 server-  which will fail.     Windows clients 
prefer a BDC, but if you are using WINS (and excluding the NT4 server) 
this may help.    Maybe you can disable some of the windows networking 
services on the NT4 box.


Maybe it is easier to just create a new samba domain.  It means the 
Outlook users won't be able to do domain-based authentication to Exchange.