Why do hardware problems always happen on a Sunday? Maybe because I'm working instead of resting like I was taught in Sunday School, or maybe my computers need the 7th day of rest. I don't know. Just seems to me if I have a server crash, its always on a Sunday.
The PDC of my home network is a mom-n-pop Pentium Pro 200 with 64MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Server. It has seen a lot of action since 1996 when I had it built, and sometimes it starts getting pissy by making a lot of noise. The noise usually goes a way after a few days. I went through 2 power supply units and have another boxed and ready to go. But this noise was different. A scary, metallic, big rattlin' kind of noise.
Hey, I've been putting off migrating Active Directory and DNS to a newer server (though not much: a 1999 mom-n-pop 550Mhz Intel III), and since I couldn't stand the noise of my old faithful PDC, today had to be to day to get the migration underway.
It took the afternoon and evening, but I successfully migrated Active Directory and DNS to their new home. DNS required some clean-up, and it took some time to get Exchange Server on another server to talk to its new Active Directory location, but I finally got that working. The old Pentium Pro was my primary file server as well, so I'll take care of that along with rewriting backup scripts tomorrow. Another issue is that I had to setup Active Directory on my server running Sharepoint, and though everything Sharepoint-related works on the server itself, other servers can't find the workspace or the web share. I'll deal with that tomorrow, too. That's what Mondays are for, after all. Sundays are for getting a jump on the week. Or at least they usually are.
[update] Later that same day... Sharepoint and Active Server do happily coexist on the network, as all functions are now available from remote machines. The file server areas on the dying server have been relocated to a fat drive on a fast server, and I copied only the most vital stuff to give myself a fresh start with clean folders and a lot less of them. The old server is shut down. All is quiet. Time to get ready for the work week ahead.