Active Directory Replication and Failover questions

[mlchris2]

I did searching on the forums and found alot of useful information. One thing that isnt clear to me is what happens when the primary DC fails for whatever reason, will the child DC automatically take on the responsibility of as the Primary DC or will the Administrator have to manually promote?

Mark
Network Admin - Digital Draw Network

 

[technome]

Assuming the dead FSMO has all the roles, the second DC will provide login ability, with consideration provided in the link below, and both DCs are global catalogs. You will need to either recreate the FSMO with an AD database restore ( after the FSMO machine is repaired or another hardware similar machine is used), or seize the AD roles on the second DC, or you will not be able to provide other AD functions. Very important to have redundant disks, dual PS units and a reliable tape unit on the FSMO.

http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3072151

 

[mlchris2]

Forgive me if I seem a bit stupid... this type of configuration exceeds my knowledge base, thus I am trying to learn as much as possible

What is involved in seizing the AD roles from the second DC. Is is as easy as promoting the second DC to main or primary? If so, what do I do when I get the primary DC operational and want to revert back to my original config?

Each of our servers have RAID5 and dual -PS and we do offsite backups each night.

 

[MJanssen01]

You've got 2 ways of fixing this.
1. restoring the failed DC to it's last known functioning state using backup media and do nothing else
2. seizing all the FSMO roles to the 2nd DC and cleanup all metadata of the failed DC in AD. After you've done this don't restore the failed DC to it's previous working state. You'll have to reinstall w2k3 and run Dcpromo to get it working like a DC again.

For information on seizing roles and metadata cleanup look at the links provided by:


mlichstein (MIS) 2 May 04 20:45
First you need to seize the 5 FSMO roles to the new server:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=255504

Then you need to do a metadata cleanup of the old server:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=216498