Most of the articles I reviewed refer to upgrading an existing NT PDC to Windows 2000 Server – however we want to replace the existing PDC and BDC with new servers that have Windows 2000 Server installed. Our network is currently running Exchange 5.5, File Server, Proxy, and a few other stand alone servers on Windows NT 4.0. In addition, I have just introduced an IIS standalone server running Win2K server. The current PDC also acts as our print server and the BDC acts alone.
I know I should take a BDC offline in case their is a problem with the Win2K upgrade, and I have full backups of all the servers. I want to find out the proper procedure for replacing the existing NT domain controllers with Win2K (without upgrading the actual NTmachine with Win2K, if possible). We plan to go to Win2K on the PDC and BDC soon, and eventually upgrade the rest of the NT servers, so I figure we would have to run in mixed mode until that time.
Lastly, how does the Win2K server DNS naming scheme fit into our current domain name? For example, if our current domain is called ALPHA, how do I name the Win2K server (I was under impression it would be called something like alpha.org, and so forth with child domains, although I dont see how itwould communicate with existing NT servers under ALPHA domain). I installed the Win2K web server under the ALPHA domain, and I get an error message in Event Viewer stating the domain name isn’t DNS type and some Win2K features won’t be fully utilized with the current naming convention.
I appreciate your help,
Dan