My current office environment relies on MS Windows Server 2008 R2 system as its primary domain controller (PDC), handling Active Directory-based user management and authentication, DNS and DHCP services. We have a secondary system as backup, which stays in-sync with the AD and DNS services; DHCP is, of course, not activated on the secondary so as to avoid broadcasting >1 DHCP service on the network.
We had an incident this past week where the PDC began to act – the best I can call it is – twitchy. Connectivity issues, erratic behavior, etc. So my first step was to point all clients to the secondary DC in order to buy me the room to troubleshoot.
One of the things I have always dreaded was having to activate the secondary’s DHCP service and then having to manually input a bunch of the info (most notably, the lease configurations and established reservations). Fortunately, my colleague Jorge Abellas-Martin discovered that, unbeknownst to either of us, it’s easy to port the entire configuration to another system.
Full instructions can be found here.
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