1:00 AM
Paul B
Last night I had to do some maintenance on my corporate network. I had to basically swap out a domain controller with a new one. The reason being is one of our domain controllers (DC) was running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Core. Windows Core is awesome because it is fairly light, and certainly less resource intensive than the full version of Windows. The problem with it is that there are some limitations.
The limitations we ran into was being able to run the MessageOps Password Sync client on it. I decided to build a new DC running on the full version of Windows. I wanted it to keep the same name as the one I was replacing so that meant the old one had to go. To cleanly get rid of the DC, one must first demote it, then remove it from the domain. Before removing it I transferred all of it's FSMO roles to one of the other DC's then ran the following:
dcpromo /AdministratorPassword:<New Local Admin Password>
The above command is the simplest command to remove a DC from an Active Directory domain. It simply assumes the default settings, and assigns a new local admin password. Boom, done. There are other options one can do as well which you can find by running:
dcpromo /?:demotion
If you don't need to do anything except remove a DC, then the first command should suit you just fine.
[Via Technet]
del.icio.us tags: how, to, demote, windows, 2008, r2, core, domain, controller, dc
- Move all fsmo roles
- Raise functional levels on Windows Server 2008 Server Core
- Move a single FSMO role
