Me vs Active Directory Round 1

Recently I was asked to be a Sys Admin of a small practice Doctor’s Office locally.  I thought, “Sure, what can be too hard?”  I looked over the previous setup and their current DNS/AD server was… ancient!  It’s running Server 2000 and barely limping along, as it serves as also their Exchange, Fax, and File servers with a single core, less than 4 gigs.  Luckily they have a spare server that currently only serves faxes. 

This morning before I school I decided to head over and upgrade the new server as an Active Directory and DNS server.  Shouldn’t be too hard.  I’ve dealt with AD before and how difficult can it be to setup?  Besides Server 2003 has wizards that make things simple to setup!

I went through the wizard and got everything running.  The server needed to be rebooted and so I did.  Once it booted, it asked for the admin password, which I made sure to remember, and entered it in.  Didn’t work… o_0 Tried again… still nothing.  I was sure that I remembered, how could I fat finger something wrong twice?  I kept trying and trying and trying, until I locked the account out. 

Now I was in a big pickle.  No way to access the server, and the office was about to open… without a fax server which meant no faxes!!!  I was starting to sweat, and finally turned over to my buddies over at ServerFault for some guidance. 

At first I thought that I had set the domain admin password, but then I realize I hadn’t set the admin password but actually a Directory Server Recovery password. 

I tried everything to recover the password, between booting and using ntpassword to reset the password (which doesn’t work).  I tried this nifty guide (still no luck).  After about 4 hours of swearing, praying, pleading, talking to the server, and almost throwing the server out the door, I was no closer than I was when I started. 

Finally,  I came across the answer.  I had to uninstall Active Directory.  I did and everything was restored back to it’s original state. 

I missed all my classes for the day, worked on a server for over 4 hours to only get back to the same spot and no pay (I didn’t feel right charging them for nothing). 

What did I learn? 

• Read through EVERYTHING when installing
• Research, research, research!
• Don’t do anything major IT right before or during office hours
• Sometimes, you’re just wrong. 

Learn from my Fail everyone!

Until next time….