Windows Tipsheet #35 Adprep
This is from Don Jones' current article in MCP Magazine
** Don Jones' Tip Sheet #35: The New and Improved Adprep
Adprep.exe is a nifty tool included with Win2003 that prepares
a Win2K domain for upgrading to Win2003. Essentially, you run
Adprep before installing your first Win2003 domain controller,
and all's well.
Or is it? Adprep takes some serious steps. You have to run
adprep /forestprep on your existing schema master, and then run
adprep /domainprep on each infrastructure master in each domain
in your forest. The domainprep bit locks down the security on
all GPOs currently in your domain. Changing the security on the
GPOs forces the File Replication Service (FRS) to re-replicate
those GPOs to all domain controllers, ensuring they all have a
consistently configured version of the GPOs.
If you have a zillion GPOs, you can plan on sitting back and
relaxing while the FRS tries to catch up. If you're like one
customer of mine, things may never catch up: They had too many
domain controllers on the other side of slow WAN links, and the
file copy of six dozen GPOs (I'm not kidding) could
never complete successfully. Oops.
Microsoft to the rescue with Win2003 SP1! More specifically, an
enhanced version of Adprep that's available now as a hotfix. The
new version forgoes the permissions change as part of the
domainprep operation, allowing you to get your domain ready for
Win2003 without all the FRS action having to take place. When
you're ready, you can run adprep /domainprep /gpprep to slap on
the new permissions. By the way, you don't want to skip this
step, because it's necessary for the Resultant Set of Policy
(RSoP) feature to deal with site-based GPOs. This enhancement
just lets you decide when the FRS frenzy will occur, allowing
you to perform this step during off-hours, if desired.
--Don Jones
Comment on this article:
https://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?editorialsid=919#post
Don Jones is the owner and operator of ScriptingAnswers.com, a
speaker at national technical IT conferences, and the author of
nearly twenty books on information technology. His latest book
is "Managing Windows with VBScript and WMI" (Addison-Welsey) and
he's completing "Windows Administrator's Automation Toolkit"
(Microsoft Press). You can reach Don at his Web site or at
don@scriptinganswers.com.