My lone windows 2003 domain controller died today. The boot/OS/App drive appears to have decided it didn’t want to live anymore. No warning, just dead. Won’t power up, won’t even make a little whine.
Ok fine. I’ve mentioned enough times that 2k3 and Active Directory are rather overkill for the home office. I even solicited options a while back (still pondering some of ‘em).
What’s the real challenge though? Windows Profiles. Saved settings, desktop settings, start menu items. All the users on all the machines have profiles associated with the (deceased) server. As I set up the machines to be in a common workgroup — removing from domain in other words — the profiles get lost. Sucks to log into that default crayola style XP desktop, ya know?
On each machine I pull it into the workgroup, reboot. Login as local admin and give the (new) local owner full permissions on the domain user’s stuff under Documents and Settings\username. Then copy over what makes sense. It works (mostly, note there’s no registry stuff being moved around here) but is tedious.
Alternative would be to just leave the machines in the (deceased) domain. They’ll still log in on cached credentials and all. And that would work just fine if the dead server wasn’t the one hosting the shared printer and drives.
Good news, at least, is that the data drive lived and is now taking up a slot in my desktop while I puzzle out my next step. I applied to be in the Windows Home Server beta recently… that would be handy about now!
Ok, here’s for the linux advocates: Yes, I thought about replacing the dead server with a linux server. Yes, I know it can do file sharing. Yes, it sucks small donkey parts through a straw when working with my (shared) HP Officejet 6110 multi-function print/copy/scan/fax machine. Oh, and yes, I’d still have the profile problem to solve. But thanks for thinking of me!
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February 18th, 2007 
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