restoring an image in an AD environment

[Red Squirrel]

This just occured to me today, since we ran into an issue at work with an exchange server in our test environment, and after restoring an image, it would no longer authenticate to the domain.

Machine account passwords change every 30 days. So if you go to restore an image chances are the machine password will be different, and it wont authenticate to the DC. So what is the proceedure to fix this? In some cases disjoining and joining back ain't an option. I dont think this would go very well with an exchange server, for example, as it is tied into AD.

 

[Brazen]

Hmm, I've had that happen before on workstations, and just disjoined and rejoined. I don't know what you would do in a situation such as with an Exchange server. Looks like this should fix you right up. Here is another article that says pretty much the same thing.

 

[networkman]

In our environment we take the machine off the domain(ie, make it a member of a workgroup) before doing any Ghosting(imaging) whether we use Sysprep or not, as a way to make the process cleaner. Typically, we do use Sysprep, so when an image is restored, the machine is named manually and then joined to the domain.

I've not tried ghosting an Exchange server before, but I do know there is a set of steps to follow if ghosting a Citrix server. Also, there are some issues with ghosting domain controllers.