Served..

Posted on July 18, 2005 No Comments

Last month I had some challenges with my home domain server. At the time, I recall thinking that I really should get another machine going to mirror that one. If it ever were to die, I’d be kinda hosed.

It died last Sunday night.

I pretty much ignored it all last week in some vague hope that I’d have a really good idea… what I wanted to avoid was building a new domain server and having to move all the clients to a new domain. Even if named the same, the underlying ID is different and it’s just a big pain in the butt.

Saturday morning I poked and prodded at it for a few hours. The “boot-to-Rescue-mode-and-run-chkdsk” wasn’t the cure this time. Thing is, it would start to boot, get to the splash screen and then after 30 seconds the keyboard would flash and the screen would blank out. I swapped around some hardware, trying to figure out if I had a hardware issue (it died after a neighborhood power outage) but that didn’t seem to change anything. And had I ever made a decent backup and Automated System Recovery floppy? Heh. no. Who will shoe the cobbler’s children?

So, I finally sucked it up and decided I was going to have to reload the dang thing. Figured I’d jump back in to rescue mode one last time and copy the registry dat files to another drive just to have ‘em around. Maybe after a fresh load I could sneak ‘em back in. Kind of a brain transplant, if you will… But wait — what’s this? Backup registry files from early in June when this was last acting up!!! Well, ok then, let’s grab those and make ‘em live.

And voila — she works!

Spent some more time saturday afternoon backing it all up and creating an ASR floppy (amusing that the floppy drive on the server doesn’t actually work.. so if I need the ASR, I’ll have to find a working floppy drive).

Frankly, this active directory/DNS server stuff is way overkill for the home network. NT4’s domain worked just fine, pity it’s no longer supported. It was “simpler” and much easier to config. I have stuff wrong on my current domain controller based on the amount of DNS messages it spews, but frankly I couldn’t figure it out and since it all still works I don’t much care. Nice attitude, huh? Someday I need to rethink this. The domain is nice since it makes file and printer sharing nice and simple with only having to worry about one username and password for everything, but… is the hassle worth it for home? Probably would be if I was more educated.