server migration 2003-2008, advice needed

[SmellyLlama]

Had a good time thanks llama. How do you give a server a second name? never done that or even realised it was possible.. Thanks for the walkthrough skreem, it will be most heklpful when i do this next week.

How do, here's the link to Petri's site. We followed these instructions to add a second name and then promote that name and remove the old name thus negating another reinstall.

Rename Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers

[jjohnsoncantell]

sorry had a blonde moment there... re read it and ive got it now.. Should i be able to add as a second name to my new 2k8dc the name of the current dc its replacing? Or will this cause merry hell?

[SmellyLlama]

sorry had a blonde moment there... re read it and ive got it now.. Should i be able to add as a second name to my new 2k8dc the name of the current dc its replacing? Or will this cause merry hell?

I would have thought that having 2 dc's with the same name was a definite no no (edit: confirmed) . We made a vmware copy of the old server and then installed 2008 on the main server. We called that NEWRDC and left the old one as it was. Copied all the stuff we needed off the old one and did the dcpromo. Then we renamed the old dc to OLDRDC and renamed the new one to the old name. (hope that makes sense!!)

[jjohnsoncantell]

yep that makes sense. Ill make sure i choose an alternate name.. One more thing thats struck me, thinking passwords now, none of our passwords would comply with password complexity that 2k8 uses. Will migrating the dc's to 2k8 force password changes for all the users?

[jjohnsoncantell]

can i update the schema/domain level when there are people using the domain?

[sukh]

yes you can. Best performed on the scheme master.

Sukh