[Samba] DC Cloning

[Rowland Penny]

On 13/09/2022 21:52, David Wells - Alfavinil S.A. via samba wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm trying to clone a samba 4.10.8 AD DC that is running on a server in 
> my production network into a fully isolated VM where I'm installing an 
> updated fresh copy of the os which has samba 4.15.9 with the same IP 
> address and hostname as the production server has. My plan was to make 
> an offline backup of the DC and restore this backup in the new DC but I 
> found the documentation that states "Similar to doing a provision, you 
> need to specify a new DC when you run the restore command. This new DC 
> must not have existed previously in the Samba network". Is there a way 
> to restore a backup into a server without having to rename it?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> Best regards,
> David Wells.

Sorry to be a bit late in replying, but I cannot recommend doing this. 
If you have running DC's, then just join a new DC. If you require 
backups, you should backup the domain with samba-tool and then use that 
backup if you get a catastrophic failure. AD is constantly changing and 
if you use a snapshot, you can re-introduce incorrect changes back into 
AD, because the 'cloned' DC will replicate to all other DC's.

Rowland