Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations SkipVought on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Upgrading NT 4.0 to 2000...
- Thread starter french44
- Start date
French44,
I too am preparing for my NT 4.0 to Win2K (& Exchange 5.5 to E2K). The most important thing that you can do is to set up a test network first. Make an ERD from your "real" network (run rdisk.exe from the RUN command) and restore it to an old machine (make sure the old machine is OFF of the real network). Add similar services (dhcp, wins, print shares, etc.). Stick the cd in, and see what happens. I have done quite a few (test) upgrades, and I have to say that M$ did a nice job. It goes really well.
Once you have the process down & all of your documentation down (documentation should be: 1. Insert cd, 2. Password is: ___, 3. IP Address:, 4. Run dcpromo.exe, etc, etc. Specificially name each step in the process for EACH server) then it's time for a test run. Schedule some down time for your Internet connection (maybe on a Saturday), plug in your test network, and start the migration. See what happens. Document any problems.
The testing phase is so important. Find the problems BEFORE you start the actual migration. You DON'T want to be seaching TechNet at Sunday/Midnight trying to figure out why client machines can't log on or browse the Internet. Find & fix these problems (& document them) now.
As an example: I ran through the above process yesterday. Everything is perfect.....except one thing. Client machines on MY network can't connect to our corporate web site. Why? Because in my plan, I used the same DNS name as our web site. Our web site is hosted offsite. Big boo boo. The fix is easy...there a number of options. And, it was a stupid mistake on my part. BUT, now that I know about it now, I can fix it before it's an issue. No worries.
Just my two cents. Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
EBR
I too am preparing for my NT 4.0 to Win2K (& Exchange 5.5 to E2K). The most important thing that you can do is to set up a test network first. Make an ERD from your "real" network (run rdisk.exe from the RUN command) and restore it to an old machine (make sure the old machine is OFF of the real network). Add similar services (dhcp, wins, print shares, etc.). Stick the cd in, and see what happens. I have done quite a few (test) upgrades, and I have to say that M$ did a nice job. It goes really well.
Once you have the process down & all of your documentation down (documentation should be: 1. Insert cd, 2. Password is: ___, 3. IP Address:, 4. Run dcpromo.exe, etc, etc. Specificially name each step in the process for EACH server) then it's time for a test run. Schedule some down time for your Internet connection (maybe on a Saturday), plug in your test network, and start the migration. See what happens. Document any problems.
The testing phase is so important. Find the problems BEFORE you start the actual migration. You DON'T want to be seaching TechNet at Sunday/Midnight trying to figure out why client machines can't log on or browse the Internet. Find & fix these problems (& document them) now.
As an example: I ran through the above process yesterday. Everything is perfect.....except one thing. Client machines on MY network can't connect to our corporate web site. Why? Because in my plan, I used the same DNS name as our web site. Our web site is hosted offsite. Big boo boo. The fix is easy...there a number of options. And, it was a stupid mistake on my part. BUT, now that I know about it now, I can fix it before it's an issue. No worries.
Just my two cents. Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
EBR
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Question