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Upgrade to 2000 Questions

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by jbk1009

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Ok, I know I am so far out of practice here that I truly just want some clarification.

I have read the Microsoft White Paper on the upgrade, but : am grey on some areas. Any help is appreicated:

I have an NT4.0 server, call it OLD, and a NT4.0 server, Called New. The New is just that, and I have promoted it to PDC from OLD, thus OLD is the BDC.

I want to just run the upgrade on NEW, if I understand correctly, and it holds all my user account information as well as my Domain information.

1. Do I need to do anything with my users after the upgrade?
2. In AD, I understand I have to put in a domain name, like xyzcompany.com? How does that effect my existing domain structure which is simply xyzcompany and also the domain my folks have in their login screens?
3. Do I have to change everyones login from xyzcomany to the xyzcompany.com?

Thanks for your help.

JB

3 replies

by mgonzales

1. No the users will become a part of Active Directors one the upgrad is complete.

2. You do not have to use xyz.com we used the first part of our public domain for our internal.
To the end user it should all look the same with no difference.

3. Suggestion. Take another machine and install it as a BDC on your network. Once its online and happy, unplug it from your network and promote it to a PDC. Then do your install to Windows 2000. You can always add another workstation to this test domain controller and test user account login. This should identify any possible problems.

by shawn

1. To do the promotion, I would switch the roles on your servers back to the way they were - OLD as the PDC, and NEW the BDC. This way, if something goes wrong with the upgrade process, you still have the writable copy of your old domain database available. I believe this is the preferred strategy according to Miscrosoft.

As for modifying anything with your users, no, you shouldn't need to do anything. All user and computer account info will be migrated when you perform the upgrade on NEW.

2. Active Driectory uses DNS for name resolution, so the domain name needs to be in s DNS format. However, you don't need to use real Internet domain names if you don't want to. For example, for of the upgrades that I have perfomed for clients, we used the suffix ".local" appended to the domain name of choice. Then you can create your zones in DNS (or let the Active Directory wizard install and configure DNS for you, it works very well) and manage them as if they were real Internet domains.

In the login screen, you will see the domain name will remain the same, since Active Directory will still allow you to keep backwards compatibility with NetBIOS-based domains.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Shawn

by jbk1009

So, How do I make the 2000 server, after upgrading NT as a BDC, the "PDC" per se? I understand that terminology goes by the way side with 2000, but will it authenticate and so forth my users with the same batch login files as I had before?

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