There's nothing like experience to teach a network administrator the right way to do something. The first stab at implementing a new technology is bound to be fraught with difficulties. A lot of network administrators come to TechRepublic to tap into the experiences of their professional peers for insight into tasks they need to do.
This was the case recently when one admin posed this question: "Can you help this admin plan for pre-Win2K migration testing?"
Joe (who didn't want his real name to be used) was tasked with testing applications used by his company for compatibility with Microsoft's Windows 2000 because his company was looking at migrating from Windows NT 4.0. Joe wisely decided to set up a test network to evaluate application compatibility, but having little experience in this area, he needed some help.
One response to Joe's problem came from Brian Coverstone, MCSE, MCDBA. Coverstone has been working with Windows 2000 for more than a year, and he warned Joe about a few little quirks. For one thing, he said that upgrading the primary domain controller (PDC) in NT to Active Directory (AD) in Win2K is going to break any DNS services that were installed on the machine when it was running NT.
In this article, Coverstone will provide the fix for the broken DNS problem and walk you through some other preparations he recommends for making the upgrade to Windows 2000.
A little research goes a long way
To obtain the proper information on application compatibility, Coverstone recommended setting up a test network that reflects, as closely as possible, the current production network.
"In a perfect world, you should be able to ghost a hard drive from your servers and install them onto identical machines in a test laboratory," Coverstone said. "However, for the rest of us, getting machines with the same type of HAL [hardware abstraction layer] and similar hardware can be acceptable."
Before committing to a particular setup on the test network, it's a good idea to read up on Win2K and see if there are new features that can be incorporated into the future network.
"Jump on the Internet and use your favorite search engine with the words 'Windows NT 2000 Migration.' Read through articles from multiple sources and take the best information from each one," Coverstone advised. "The more reference material you have to start with, the better."
Coverstone also recommends a book from Microsoft Press called MCSE Training Kit: Migrating from Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to Microsoft Windows 2000. Not only is this book great background for the upgrade, but it's also an excellent resource for taking Microsoft exam 70-222.
When implementing the upgrade on the test network, document everything. Write it all down, including what drivers you install in what order or what servers you upgrade in what order.
"Documentation and checklists will be your friends when you ultimately upgrade the production servers," Coverstone said. "It will guarantee that you will not have forgotten any steps you have performed in the test lab."
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