Windows Server 2008 – Read-Only Domain Controller

Michael has a very nice post on the RODC role available in Windows Server 2008. The post provides usefull information on the features of RODC.

Steve

Windows Server 2008 Core – Active Directory Domain Services

One of the things we can do with our newly installed machine is to promote it to a domain controller for the domain SRO-LH.local.

As the machine is running Server Core, we’ll have to do it the hard way… via command-line. Indeed the interactive version of dcpromo.exe is not available in the Server Core edition of Windows Server 2008.

In order to do this, we need to prepare an answer file that will contain all information required for the dcpromo process.

To get information on the syntax of the answer file, I used a Windows Server 2003 installation CD (as the information is not available on the Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 installation media).

In the folder D:\support\tools, locate and expand the file deploy.cab:

Within the deploy.cab file, open the ref.chm file and browse to the Unattend.txt section of the help file. That’s where you can find all the information needed. Look especially at the [DCInstall] part:

Thanks to this, I was able to produce my own unattend.txt file (the password in the last entry has been removed for obvious reasons):

Then, back on the server, we just need to launch the dcpromo command by specifying the location of the unattend.txt file (the R: drive is mapped to SRO-LH-01 where I prepared the answer file):

Then the installation proceeds:

At the end of the process, the server reboots automatically (except if specified not to do so in the answer file).

Steve