Recipe 3.4 Automating the Promotion or Demotion of a Domain Controller
3.4.1 Problem
You want to automate the
installation or removal of a domain
controller. You can make the promotion process part of your standard
build process by incorporating the necessary configuration lines in
your answer file(s).
3.4.2 Solution
You can automate the promotion of a domain controller by using the
unattended process when building the server or by manually running
dcpromo after the system has been built. Pass an
answer file containing the necessary lines to promote the server to
dcpromo by specifying a /answer
switch. Here is an example:
> dcpromo /answer:<path_to_answer_file>
If you want to run dcpromo as part of an
unattended setup, you need to add a [GUIRunOnce]
section in your unattended setup file that calls the
dcpromo process. You can
promote a domain controller only after setup has completed and
someone logs in for the first time. That is why it is necessary to
use a [GUIRunOnce] section, which sets the
RunOnce registry key to kick off
dcpromo after someone logs in. Here is an example:
[GUIRunOnce]
"dcpromo /answer:%systemroot%\system32\$winnt$.inf"
The dcpromo answer section starts with
[DCInstall]. Here is an example answer file for
adding a domain controller to an existing domain in the rallencorp.com forest:
[DCINSTALL]
UserName=administrator
Password=RAllencorpAdminPassword
UserDomain=rallencorp.com
DatabasePath=%systemroot%\ntds
LogPath=%systemroot%\ntds
SYSVOLPath=%systemroot%\sysvol
SafeModeAdminPassword=DSrestoreModePassword
CriticalReplicationOnly=no
ReplicaOrNewDomain=Replica
ReplicaDomainDNSName=rallencorp.com
RebootOnSuccess=yes
CreateOrJoin=Join
3.4.3 Discussion
For a complete list of Windows Server 2003
[DCInstall] settings, see the ref.chm help file in \support\tools\deploy.cab that can be found
on the Windows Server 2003 CD. For Windows 2000, the settings can be
found in the unattend.doc file in
\support\tools\deploy.cab on the
Windows 2000 CD.
3.4.4 See Also
MS KB 223757 (Unattended Promotion and Demotion of Windows 2000
Domain Controllers), and MS KB 224390 (How to Automate Windows 2000 Setup
and Domain Controller Setup)
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