Win2000 DC Question

[drhopkins]

We had a remote office (50 users) with a Win2000 DC drop off the
network because of a flood. We moved to another location and set up a
small LAN containing the DC. They have been offline for 2 months now
and changes have been made to AD on that DC. Meanwhile back at the
ranch, we have continued operating as normal with our 4 other DCs and
changes have been made here as well. We are now preparing to bring the
other DC back online and have a couple questions:

1. What am I looking at as far as AD synchronization once the solo DC
is back?

2. Is he going to play nice and come back on without thinking he has
his own AD?

Solo DC is not a global catalog or FSMO.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions, Dave.

 

[Herb Martin]

We had a remote office (50 users) with a Win2000 DC drop off the
network because of a flood. We moved to another location and set up a
small LAN containing the DC. They have been offline for 2 months now
and changes have been made to AD on that DC. Meanwhile back at the
ranch, we have continued operating as normal with our 4 other DCs and
changes have been made here as well. We are now preparing to bring the
other DC back online and have a couple questions:

1. What am I looking at as far as AD synchronization once the solo DC
is back?

UNLESS this is more than 60 days (you say 2 months) for a domain
originally installed with a Win2000 DC (or maybe 180 days for an
original Win2003) the following should be true:

As long as you can get the DCs IP address* properly registered (and
replicated) with the DNS the other DCs use it should "just work."

* Chances are fair that you had to change the IP address when you
moved the DC to another location.

2. Is he going to play nice and come back on without thinking he has
his own AD?

If the DC has exceeded the 60 (or 180 days) then he will need to be
DCPromo "cycled" and HIS changes will therefore be lost.

Solo DC is not a global catalog or FSMO.

He should be a DC since every site should have a GC and in a single
domain forest every DC should be a GC. But that is a separate issue.

 

[Paul Williams [MVP]]

Minor correction - Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 is what changes the
default tombstone lifetime to 180 days if a fresh install. 2003 RTM is also
60.

Also, if you install 2003 SP1 and R2 before promoting to a DC (before
creating your domain, i.e. 1st DC) it will be back to 60 as there's a bug in
the schema.ini file in R2 (it's the k3 RTM value not the SP1 value).