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Take 2 <insert your favourite mind numbing, brain halucinating, aphrodisiac or other drug(s) here> and don't call me until next month, when I've finally got this stupid thing going...

It is really that serious. In "take 1" I talked about using ADMT 2.0 to upgrade our library's infrastructure to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory. But what I didn't describe last time was what happened to my domain afterward, and why I chose a different method to migrate.

So I had Server 2003 running, along with my ghosted image of NT4 on a temprorary server. Downloaded and installed ADMT 2.0, but what was proper order to upgrade? I started out with this Microsoft Knowledgebase article. But that wasn't quite enough, so I found and followed this article on TechReplublic to a point. The stumbling block I hit was how to setup the trust relationship between the two domains.This didn't tell me how it was done, so I had to dig deeper. After some time I finally came across this.

Now that the trust relationship between the two domains was working, I was able to carry over the users via ADMT, no problem. But the computers were not transfering. I had a the trust relationship between domains established, the migration user in both domains and with administrative rights, and even the migration user listed locally in the test migration XP machines, but the computer information transer still failed. It wasn't until I added "[Active Directory Domain Name]Domain Admins" into the administrators group local the machine I was attempting to migrate before ADMT would properly transfer the computer into Active Directory. Putting it simply, each XP Workstation needed to "Trust" the new domain for it allow such a transfer.

However, all this research was unfortunately taking too long. In order to ease the pain for the staff and public, I decided to switch all the clients back to the NT4 domain until I got the migration method practised enough to work without flaws. Ah the joys of running around to each machine in order to switch the domains around.

Then I started installing all of the new software required (eg Backup Exec) and toying with some of Server 2003's new services and features (eg. Shadow Copy Service and Software Update Services). I realized that the 256 Megs of memory installed in our 4 year old file server was not going to be enough. Especially since Backup Exec installed an instance of MSDE. MSDE is really like MSSQL 2000 "lite" Edition, and a heftly application to run on an already service laden server.
Realizing that the memory in this server was too little, I set out to purchase another 256 Megs of ECC Registered SDRAM from Crucial. Guess what? The finicky server rejected it, and rejected the next DIMM Crucial sent too. So, to make a long, boring story short, 3 weeks later I plugged the equivilent stick from Kingston inside the server and it worked immediately.

While waiting for the memory to arrive I had some time to contemplate the workload before me. Running around again to each staff machine to have it setup so that admt could work it's wonder was starting to get on my nerves. In consultation with some friends of mine they kept asking me why I don't setup a couple of temporary upgrade servers and perform the migration to Server 2003 that way. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea of only running around to three machines instead of sixty (OK, 16 of those Windows 98 OPACs... but we have soo many public XP boxes with Deepfreeze...) this route for the upgrade just made alot more sense.

Coming Soon to a journal near you: Active Directory, Take Three