upgrading from winnt 4.0 , single PDC

[John Mathey]

I have a very small private domain network, with a single PDC running
windows NT 4.0 server.This server is not on the public ( ie: internet)
network and I'm trying to upgrade to win2K server and I'm having a
hard time with the Active Directory setup. I realize it wants the
domain name to be dns resolvable, I'm not even sure if I really need
AD but can't get it to complete the upgrade unless I go through the
wizard. My client PC's are all win2K clients, they worked fine with
the NT domain controller. I simply want a domain controller which
worked the same as the winnt domain. A central place to manage the
resources and users, nothing more. I only needed to upgrade since a
particular application we're using doesn't support NT. I don't mind,
at this point, re=installing win2k server as a new install, but I'm
not sure if it will solve the dilemma. Can someone who has already
gone through this please enlighten me.

Thanks in advance
John

 

[SaltPeter]

In a certain respect, you need not worry about the dns resolvable name since
upgrading the NT4 PDC to a W2K root DC will both maintain the netbios name
the old network used and support the new hierarchical dns name.

However, carefull planning and consideration for the new dns name will
prevent uncomfortable situations in the future. Since the domain is private
and it is resonably expected to remain private, go with the "domain.local"
configuration instead of "whatever.com".

Not that i want to discourage you, but the way W2K is managed is drastically
different than how NT4 is managed. In my opinion, W2K is light years ahead
and therefore reading the whitepapers on W2K domain management is highly
recommended. MMC, OUs, Sites, GPOs as well as dns hierarchy don't exist in
NT4.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/default.asp