OK, I have my ideas on the answer to this but would
love some input as I have never run across such a
bizarre, yet well entrenched design. I have a new client
with workstations running mostly Win98. A few are
XPPro. The last tech sold them aserver and Win2k
Server . All licensing is correct, but under review. BUT,
he created all local users (over 20 of them) instead of
setting up a Domain and AD. My guess is he did not
know how from what I have seen. Effectively it’s P2P.
TheXP stations have matching Local acct’s created that
the users log in as. All stations have staic private ip’s
and manually mapped drives. I will be setting up this
LAN on AD with Domain Users & Groups, DHCP, DNS,
and user home directories etc. Here is the area of
concern. When I do dcpromo I will loose all the local
acct’s. I will have to create Domain acct’s. What will
happen to file permissions? I am assuming I will have
to reassign the new acct’s to the old files or simply
move files to the user dir. What about accounting
database files and the like that can not be moved? Is
there a way to migrate the local acct’s to domain
thereby maintaining and SID’s? When the XP users
now logon as a domain user, and not their local user,
they will get a new profile and I will have to move their
my documents as well. Any idea’s on the smoothest
way to have the domain but still have user access to
their files?