Need Help

[Bud Guy]

Here is the deal, I am about to inherit a server room and its associated users. The servers are Win2k in a AD environment. The problem is that they (the ones running the show now) don't have control over the network, and in the past (NT days) they've used WINS servers and have been manually setting the clients up with the wins server addresses so that they could authenticate.

My problem is that they are moving the servers and users into a different building very soon and so and one of my first issues will be how to enable everyone to authenticate. I'm expecting that even though they will be in the same buildings that they will be on different subnets. Is there any script that can be run before hand to change the wins server IP's on the clients?

How would you handle it?

Thanks,
Shane

 

[Ryoga]

Bleah.

Can't you just configure a DHCP server to give out WINS information?

 

[LanFear]

Originally posted by: Ryoga
Bleah.

Can't you just configure a DHCP server to give out WINS information?

yes.

 

[LanFear]

Originally posted by: Bud Guy
Here is the deal, I am about to inherit a server room and its associated users. The servers are Win2k in a AD environment. The problem is that they (the ones running the show now) don't have control over the network, and in the past (NT days) they've used WINS servers and have been manually setting the clients up with the wins server addresses so that they could authenticate.

My problem is that they are moving the servers and users into a different building very soon and so and one of my first issues will be how to enable everyone to authenticate. I'm expecting that even though they will be in the same buildings that they will be on different subnets. Is there any script that can be run before hand to change the wins server IP's on the clients?

How would you handle it?

Thanks,
Shane

Active Directory can handle everything you need to accomplish. Go get yourself a book on AD and Win2K, it sounds like you'll need one as your scenario is posing a problem for you. You'll need to do a topology, i.e., how many servers, what type, domain controllers, dns servers, etc., etc., and which servers are everyone authenticating to. Once you know this info you can set pretty much every option you'll need in AD. DHCP, DNS, MX and pointer records, as well as routing tables (this is where your different subnets will come into play),reverse lookups, and WINS. -->although if all the computers in your company are WIN2K or better, WINS is pretty much invalid. It's used to resolve netbios names on older machines so they can be seen on the network, so if there isn't an NT box or 98 machine in the network, AD takes care of resolving computer names and you don't have to use WINS. This is just a skim, actually way to brief even to call a skim over what you're in store for. Get a couple of good books on AD planning and implementation.
Cheers.:beer:

 

[Bud Guy]

Thanks for the replies. I think that setting up a DHCP server would be a confilct as they don't actually have control over the current dhcp servers or any other part of the network. Its a really big company and kind of hard to explain.

Looks like I've got some heavy reading to do!