Upgrade DC's to 2003 - Best method?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Scott McDonald
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Scott McDonald

I wanted to get some suggestions from those that have already done this, or have what they feel is a solid plan in place for doing this. I'm a bit nervous about doing this so any and all recommendations are welcome.
 
Since 2000 and 2003 are multi-master, IE, there is no PDC-vs-BDC
distinction, my recommendation is to install a clean piece of hardware (even
one that wouldn't be a 'server' by any reasonable definition of the word)
and make that my first DC to upgrade. That way I'm upgrading a pristine
computer, so that if something heinous goes wrong during the install (think
power failure), I haven't altered or affected any production applications
that are residing on my "real" servers.

That, and of course, backup backup backup test your backups backup. :-)

--
******************************
Laura E. Hunter - MCSE, MCT, MVP
Replies to newsgroup only


I wanted to get some suggestions from those that have already done this, or
have what they feel is a solid plan in place for doing this. I'm a bit
nervous about doing this so any and all recommendations are welcome.
 
so take say a desktop, install a fresh copy of 2003 on it, promote it into
the domain as a 3rd DC, then remove the two DC's from the domain, relaod
them with fresh copies of 2003 and promote them back into the now 2003
domain?

I was thinking of doing exactly that but I thought I might loose some
functionality or something.
 
I wouldn't even remove/reload the two existing production DCs, really.
After the "clean" 2003 DC is up and running and you're satisfied that
everything is replicating well, I'd just do a straight-up upgrade on the 2
remaining DCs. So if your domain is 'company.com', it'd look something
like this:

1. Install 2K Server on a new machine. (Call it foo.company.com)
2. Run dcpromo to make foo.company.com a domain controller for the existing
2000 domain.
3. Run forestprep & domainprep, then upgrade foo.company.com to 2003.
4. Once you're satisfied that nothing untoward happened to your network in
Step 3, upgrade your 2 remaining 2000 DCs to 2003. (After you've verified
that all existing apps will function after the upgrade.)

--
******************************
Laura E. Hunter - MCSE, MCT, MVP
Replies to newsgroup only


Scott McDonald said:
so take say a desktop, install a fresh copy of 2003 on it, promote it into
the domain as a 3rd DC, then remove the two DC's from the domain, relaod
them with fresh copies of 2003 and promote them back into the now 2003
domain?

I was thinking of doing exactly that but I thought I might loose some
functionality or something.
Click to expand...
 
Hmmm...I never would have thought to install 2K on a new machine...Guess
I'll go that way...I'm doing a test run of it first, our DC's have always
had a tendency to be a little goofy at times (currently one of them decides
to stop authenticating users on a whim, then you reboot it and it works
again + the performance logs and alerts service wont start and there's some
service called "data" that won't start either, it points to control.exe;
nothing useful in event viewer (what else is new) for either of those
problems either - I haven't been able to resolve that, so for that one it
will probably get reloaded).


--
SCOTT MCDONALD
Laura E. Hunter (MVP) said:
I wouldn't even remove/reload the two existing production DCs, really.
After the "clean" 2003 DC is up and running and you're satisfied that
everything is replicating well, I'd just do a straight-up upgrade on the 2
remaining DCs. So if your domain is 'company.com', it'd look something
like this:

1. Install 2K Server on a new machine. (Call it foo.company.com)
2. Run dcpromo to make foo.company.com a domain controller for the existing
2000 domain.
3. Run forestprep & domainprep, then upgrade foo.company.com to 2003.
4. Once you're satisfied that nothing untoward happened to your network in
Step 3, upgrade your 2 remaining 2000 DCs to 2003. (After you've verified
that all existing apps will function after the upgrade.)
Click to expand...
 
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