I had some more fun with the old Windows 2000 server today.
When we got the new Windows 2003 server we tried to join it to the current domain just to the get the users and security permissions all taken care of. There was an extra issue involved though. All of the programming done in MS Access, and who knows how many other C# applications had a hard coded path to the server name and sometimes the IP Address.
So I decided the best course of action was to swap out the servers and then re-join the old one to the new domain.
Uh Oh...
There was a huge mess. The Active Directory on both servers went crazy, and I ended up wiping the new server (since there was nothing on it yet anyway) and keeping the old server running as long as I could until I figured out the other issues in the way. (like an HP Unix server that was being kept alive by a "feature" that pinged the IP Address of the server to make sure it still had a connection to the network. IE, if I shutdown the server, nobody from the outside world could access the HP Unix server... a mess, figured it out with some tricky routing on the server)
So I finally got the new server up and running and then I moved on to the old server. It could still be used except for the fact that it had the same name, same IP Address, ... same everything as the new one. So I went to remove the Active Directory from it. HAH, fat joke there.
In the end I had to use this little trick to fix it.
1. Run regedt32 from the run command.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ProductOptions
2. Change the ProductType's value from LanmanNT to ServerNT
3. Shut it down and reboot. It should start working from there with no active directory and then it will let you re-name it and change it to a workgroup computer, instead of a domain computer.
Good luck to anybody that runs into that problem too.