Replacing my PDC server..Best way to...

[mboy]

Main PDC/File server is going to be SEVERLY upgraded in a week or 2. Going form 350Mhz PII,RAID 1 -7Gb TOTAL, 512 MB PC66 ram to...1.13 PIII 512k L2 cache, 740mb PC133 72GB RAID 5 🙂.
What is the best way for me to bring over the files that everyone access so that I wont have to change user rights etc. SHould I just copy D drive to D drive over network? Or do a tape backup (Using Arcserve) and then restore to the new D drive? OS will be NT 4. sp6a.
Thanx. Oh, and I will of course set it up as a BDC, then promote it to PDC when it is completed, then of course use the old server as the BDC/ remote access rig instead of the 6 yr old desktop they are using now!

 

[Nothinman]

Other than the fact that all that hardware seems overkill for a PDC/fileserver (you would probably be fine adding more hard disk space and memory to the original one) and that you shouldn't have the PDC be doing anything else, you should be able to backup all the data, account info, etc and restore it to the new server. I would think you could also just backup the data, make it a BDC, let it sync and then promote it to PDC.

Personally, I would leave the 350 as the PDC and setup the new box as a standalone file server, but then again I wouldn't use NT either =)

 

[mboy]

Well, if it were up to me, I wouldnt either. It unfortuntely isnt and I have to work within they way it was already setup. Within the next 6 mos or so, there will be a few applications run off of it, but this is the way the company was originally set up and this is the way it is. I wish I could at least switch to 2k server, but they wont let me since they already paid for Nt 4 long ago.

 

[Nothinman]

I'd choose NT 4 over Win2K unless you've got an AD already planned out. All I mean is having hte PDC do double duty as a fileserver is a dumb idea.

 

[mboy]

I agree, I don't like having it do double duty either, but the people who originally set everything up really screwed things up bad, but the owner insists on keeping the layout the same. If it were to change, then I would have to go to all 70 workstations and re-map everyone's drives and show them where their folders are so they can access them and that won't work too well, so it is what it is!

 

[netsysadmin]

Why not just setup spme login scripts to map your drives....beats running around to 70 different desktops?

 

[mboy]

Because the idiots that set everything up did not set up everyone's drives the same. One person's F drive is another persons G drive. I keep telling them to give me the names and address of the people who originally set everything up so I can go and kill them for doing such a piss poor job. I want to change everything to the way it should be, but thenmy phone would be ringing off the hook because people wouldnt be able to find their stuff!

 

[bignick]

here's what i did to replace out pdc-

1. setup new server as a bdc.
2. run job at night to copy all user data over (do this on a friday night)
3. run job to change file permissions on userdata
4. run another job to recreate all file/folder shares.


so the file copy job started at 8pm friday, the file permissions job started at 2am saturday, and the job to recreate the shares started at 4am saturday. i came in at 10am saturday, and all was working like a charm. renamed the old pdc, and rebooted. waited like 5 minutes for the domain to sync, then renamed the new server with the old name, rebooted. then created the shared printers. then promoted the bdc to primary. waited 15 minutes, and took the old pdc, which became a bdc, down. left the old pdc in place, but off for the next two weeks, and everything worked fine.

the scripts to walk through and change permissions looks like this-

cacls d:\ /T /G administrators:F
cacls d:\ /T /E /G system:F
cacls d:\ /T /E /G "server operators":C
cacls d:\ /T /E /G users:R
FOR /D %%I IN (d:\USERDATA\*) DO CACLS %%I /E /T /C /G %%~nI:C

the first four lines replace the "everyone - full control" permission that is default in NT/2000. you may want to do those four lines in a different script, and run it when your there, because the first line requires you to answer yes or no. then the last line gives the users' their rights to their folders. basically the "userdata" folder has a folder that matches each username in the domain (%%). so the permissions are edited (/E) to allow each user to have Change permissions on their folders.

you can also use robocopy, i think, to copy files/folders from server to server and keep the current permissions in place. then you wouldn't need to run the last line in the script. otherwise just use xcopy.

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