Series begins here.

I haven’t had much of a chance to work on the rebuild until this week; other things have popped up and taken precedence.  Thus, the new DC has been sitting idle in the corner of my office.

So far, things have been smooth, albeit a bit tedious.  I spent part of this week rebuilding and evaluating our current GPOs.  After a look at what some of them did, a few of them didn’t make the move.  Once the GPOs were rebuilt and adjusted accordingly, I applied them to their proper OUs.

The next task (and so far the worst) was recreating all of the user accounts and groups from our existing AD (for the first time since my hire, I’m glad we don’t have a larger staff).  I documented which users were assigned to what groups, and re-assigned them on the new domain.  Now this may be a bit overboard, but I assigned unique passwords to each user and service account that was recreated (I got my random passwords from SafePasswd.).  In addition, I took the time to enter every user’s contact information and staff info.  Was it necessary?  Probably not, but I’m a sucker for complete data, plus it’ll look good in the Exchange address book.

Now that the user base is rebuilt, it’s time to crank up another VM and install Exchange on it.  Once it’s installed and updated, I’ll be testing mailbox exporting/importing with ExMerge.  It will probably be next week (at the earliest) until this happens.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend on the domain rebuild this week, but I did get it started as of Tuesday night.  Currently it’s in the form of a Server 2003 VM.  AD was installed, and the OU structure has been replicated from our existing domain.

I used the Group Policy Management Tool to make printouts of our active GPOs.  It would be nice if the tool also allowed you to print out a list of OUs that link to each object as well, but a little bit of handwriting never hurt anyone.  I also started a mind map of everything I can think of that will need to happen for this domain migration to go smoothly.

Next week I’ll concentrate on recreating the GPOs in the new domain, as well as moving over any login scripts.  I’m also going to continue mind mapping so I can get my mind around the magnitude of this project… I’m nowhere near done.

I’m just glad I’m not on a hard timeline.

One of the projects I’ve been wanting to take on over the past year has been a rename/rebuild of our domain.  We’re still carrying our old domain name around from our previous name and location.  This hasn’t been a high-priority matter, but I do want to get it done.

After some research on how to go about it properly, I feel like I’m ready to take this on.  There’s a lot to think about and plan for, though.  The fact that I’m now able to to testing and pre-production building in VMware is a HUGE benefit, and since I’m not really on a time limit, I’m going to be able to work without being under the gun.

I’ll be posting on this more as the project take shape more.