Remove ‘dead’ server from Active Directory

I'm not sure where to find such a point-by-point comparison. I've done a quick search and I'm not coming uo with much. There is some comparison in the official Samba HOWTO at: http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/samba-pdc.html

Here's some of such a comparison based on what I know:

• With a Samba "PDC", you get a centralized account / group database for your member computers, as you would with an Active Directory domain.

• You can use the NT 4.0 "User Manager for Domains" tool to manage Samba PDC users. Active Directory can be managed with the (IMHO, cleaner and easier to use) "Active Directory Users and Computers" tool.

• You can replicate the Samba PDC's security database in a single-master fashion or multi-master fashion between multiple domain controller computers (depending on the back-end you choose to store the password data in). Active Directory is multi-master.

• A Samba PDC will perform NTLM-based authentication. Active Directory can also peform NTLMV2 and Kerberos-based authentication.

• A Samba PDC cannot provide Group Policy functionality like an Active Directory domain controller computer can.

Functionally, Samba acts as an NT 4.0 "PDC", so you can use comparison documents between the Windows NT 4.0 domain system and Active directory to give you some additional ideas.

Samba 4.0, which is still under development, is supposed to fufill the Active Directory domain controller function. An experimental branch of the Samba code, called Frankly, also seeks to implement Active Directory domain controller functionality (see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Franky).

The quick answer is to use dcpromo to add the 2008 server as a domain controller in the same domain that the 2003 server is in. Once the 2008 server is a DC, you can run dcpromo on the 2003 server to remove it as a domain controller. This will allow you to keep your Active Directory intact, but move the services to another server.

Also, as a general rule, it's highly recommended to have 2 servers be domain controllers (and global catalog servers) for your domain. That way your Active Directory stays up in the event of a failure (or reboot!)

There are lots of good articles from Microsoft and bloggers that describe this process. Here are some links:

2003 to 2008 Active Directory

Upgrading to Windows 2008 Active Directory