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Guest
Hey guys, let me lay a little ground work on this so you can give your ideas.
I was hired to help a company migrate from NT 4.0/Exchange 5.5 to Windows 2000/Exchange 2000. This company is spread out over three sites, each site being it's own NT 4.0 style domain with it's own exchange server. All the NT 4.0 domains have trusts built between them and the Exchange 5.5 systems in all three domains are part of the single exchange organization for the entire company. The three sites are Los Angeles, Whales, and Houston with Los Angeles being the largest and main corporate site. Whales and Houston have people who run IT, but generally they do day to day and escalate to us in LA if they get in over their head.
So, the easiest thing to do is to to upgrade one of the domains and make the other two child domains. That way I don't have to merge any accounts and since the administrative model is distributed to the three sites already, it makes sense to make each site a domain to allow them to have complete administrative control (after all, I don't want to add more than I have to to my plate when their quite capable of handleing it).
OK, so here's the sticky part. The IT team in Whales took it upon themselves to upgragde their NT 4.0 domain to Windows 2000 Active Directory. That makes it a little more complicated because now I have a forest root domain already established in Wales..it's our smallest site (bout 200 users). So let me share my instincts..my instincts say that the Forest root domain should be at the main site in Los Angeles and that I should take the pain to merge the two forests together later OR I could make the LA office a child domain of the one in Whales. Technically, I can't think of any reason why I shouldn't just make LA a child..but something just doesn't seem right. For example, I want the forest wide operations master roles to be where I can get to them no matter what (LA). Can you even transfer the Forest Wide roles to a child domain? or do they have to stay in the Forest root domain? I have never tried to move them out of the root domain, so I'm not even sure it's possible. Anybody have any ideas at all about this? Any gotcha's I should be aware of? Or maybe you can think of some non-technical issues that could bite me later? Any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry about thelong post, just trying to be thourough so you can have all the facts.
I was hired to help a company migrate from NT 4.0/Exchange 5.5 to Windows 2000/Exchange 2000. This company is spread out over three sites, each site being it's own NT 4.0 style domain with it's own exchange server. All the NT 4.0 domains have trusts built between them and the Exchange 5.5 systems in all three domains are part of the single exchange organization for the entire company. The three sites are Los Angeles, Whales, and Houston with Los Angeles being the largest and main corporate site. Whales and Houston have people who run IT, but generally they do day to day and escalate to us in LA if they get in over their head.
So, the easiest thing to do is to to upgrade one of the domains and make the other two child domains. That way I don't have to merge any accounts and since the administrative model is distributed to the three sites already, it makes sense to make each site a domain to allow them to have complete administrative control (after all, I don't want to add more than I have to to my plate when their quite capable of handleing it).
OK, so here's the sticky part. The IT team in Whales took it upon themselves to upgragde their NT 4.0 domain to Windows 2000 Active Directory. That makes it a little more complicated because now I have a forest root domain already established in Wales..it's our smallest site (bout 200 users). So let me share my instincts..my instincts say that the Forest root domain should be at the main site in Los Angeles and that I should take the pain to merge the two forests together later OR I could make the LA office a child domain of the one in Whales. Technically, I can't think of any reason why I shouldn't just make LA a child..but something just doesn't seem right. For example, I want the forest wide operations master roles to be where I can get to them no matter what (LA). Can you even transfer the Forest Wide roles to a child domain? or do they have to stay in the Forest root domain? I have never tried to move them out of the root domain, so I'm not even sure it's possible. Anybody have any ideas at all about this? Any gotcha's I should be aware of? Or maybe you can think of some non-technical issues that could bite me later? Any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry about thelong post, just trying to be thourough so you can have all the facts.