Additional domain controller

Hello everybody,

I have two questions:
In a network with one domain controller (windows 2003) I want to add an additional domain controller (windows 2003) in order to replicate everything on the primary DC. Can two domain controllers work parallel and replicate each other (something like a cluster)? After adding additional domain controler will it take the role of the primary if the primary fails? I am more into linux so the windows server concepts are not very clear to me.

And something else: I have a samba on a linux server which read user permissions from the domain controler with winbind. Is there a way I can migrate the samba on the additional domain controller including permissions?

I`ll appreciate every answer. Thank in advance.

 

The answer to the first is yes (but no excate cluster). In acase, one DC down, the users can logon and run logon script if the secondary DC has GC enabled. Check this case study for the details,

DC Fault Tolerance
http://www.howtonetworking.com/casestudy/dctolerance.htm

 

Thanks for the reply. So far I managed to join in the domain an additional DC. Set it up as a Global Catalog, set the replication time to four times per hour and now I am waiting to see if the replication works ( I will switch the old DC down to see if the users can log in without problems - I suppose there will be one little problem - I use for user profles a path of that type -> \\DC\profiles\Userprofile and after this DC is switched off the users will not be able to download their profiles). I`ll post the result later.