Hi all, Our company is looking at moving premises some time next year, the plan at the moment is to have a new server room with all new servers set up at the new building prior to moving the workstations over. I'm wondering if anyone has done anything like this and what the best way to proceed is. We are using an LDAP backend. I am not completely averse to unix UIDs changing (although I would rather they didn't), I *REALLY* don't want to have to manually rejoin everyone to the domain though. We have two internet connections at the old building, one is slow and cheap, the other is faster and relatively expensive. The connection at the new building will be fast and cheap. So it would be possible to sync data between systems in the lead up to the change over as long as it wasn't too much data. The options I have come up with are: 1) Set up new office as BDC and LDAP slave, upgrade to PDC and LDAP master as part of the move. 2) Set up new office as new domain, bring over old server (or create a BDC for the old domain) with logon script that migrates machines when they are first powered on at the new premises (This gets a little messy when it comes to user profiles and such but I believe it should be manageable). 3) Find something like ADMT for samba? At the moment the first option is looking like the way to go but I would be interested to hear of any other options and people's opinions. I would also be very happy if anyone can point out any possible pitfalls we are likely to face. Thanks, -- *Michael Heydon - IT Administrator * michaelh@jaswin.com.au <mailto:michaelh@jaswin.com.au>
I'd just have your current samba server as the master ldap server and PDC, and have the server at the other location be a BDC, and it can either be a slave ldap server, master/master ldap configuration, or just connect to the master ldap server directly for queries. i have a few remote sites on dsl or t-1 and they just query the LDAP server directly. also, with ldap you can specify the roaming profile location so just have the users at the remote site load their roaming profiles from the remote servers.>
"Michael Heydon" <michaelh@jaswin.com.au> wrote in message news:4A0B63CC.1080900@jaswin.com.au...> Hi all, > > Our company is looking at moving premises some time next year, the plan > at the moment is to have a new server room with all new servers set up > at the new building prior to moving the workstations over. I'm wondering > if anyone has done anything like this and what the best way to proceed is. > > We are using an LDAP backend. I am not completely averse to unix UIDs > changing (although I would rather they didn't), I *REALLY* don't want to > have to manually rejoin everyone to the domain though. > > We have two internet connections at the old building, one is slow and > cheap, the other is faster and relatively expensive. The connection at > the new building will be fast and cheap. So it would be possible to sync > data between systems in the lead up to the change over as long as it > wasn't too much data. >All the user/computer names and passwords are stored in your LDAP directory. I would take the following approach. Make sure the new server is not on the network. You do not want two machines with the same Netbios name on a network. Install LDAP on a new machine Install Samba on a new machine. Copy across your smb.conf file to the new server Use the net setlocalsid command to set the SID to the same one used by the existing Samba machine. See Managing Security Identifiers in the Official How To. Use the smbldap tools to create your intial LDAP entries. Export your existing LDAP directory to a ldif file. You may want to remove the intial LDAP entries created by the smbldap tools. Import your existing LDAP directory into LDAP on the new server. You should now have a duplicate of your existing server. You should not need to re-add the machines to the network. I used this approach when I needed to re-install my domain controller from scratch. Let us know if it works.