FSMO role transfer

Hi Guys,

fairly new to working with servers on this level anyway but wanting to move in this direction in my career so please excuse me if I may sound stupid in anyway.

I have a setup which I have inherited so did not setup initially. I have a forest which consists of 3 DC's.

Forest functional level is windows 2000 & Domain functional level is 2000 native.

2 DC's are running server 2003 Standard and the other running 2008 standard.

Now one of the 2003 servers is holding all FSMO roles, and has AD and DNS installed, but cannot replicate with any other server, and does not give you the option to change the roles to anyone else.

the other 2 can replicate to one another, and when you look and the operation masters on either of these 2 it shows ERROR under the Operation Master field.

The other server 2003 does not run DNS so looks at the operations master server for DNS which requests are not being resolved. The server 2008 runs AD and DNS and is a sharepoint server. I can ping all servers from each other by when I do nslookup from the operations master server to the other server 2003 it fails with a time out? I added the other 2003 server to the operation masters (NS) record in DNS and it then resolves its name but still cant replicate.

I want to tranfer the roles between the other 2 servers that can replicate to one another, demote the current operations master DC and then re-install AD again?

Is this the right path to take or is this a but drastic. I know once some FSMO are transfered they can't be brought back to the server (think its the schema master and one other) will look that up.

Many thanks in advance to anyones help.

Kind Regards

Ezzie

 

Hi Guys,

I seem to have gotten a little further with this (I think! lol) but still not working correctly I believe.

I went through the process of resetting the secure channel by running the following commands on both 2003 servers.

1. Stopped KDC service and set that to manual.
2. Ran resetpwd /server:SERVER’s IP /userd:USER /passwordd:*
3. Set KDC service to automatic.
4. restart server.

Now when I try to "replicate now" from sites and Services I get the following error:

The following error occured during the attempt to sychronize namng context oxin-ic.co.uk from domain controller server2 to domain controller server1:
The naming context is in the process of being removed or is not replicated from the specified server.

This operation will not continue.

Any suggestions guys?

Thanks