Advice required re: Domain Controllers and DNS

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup_deployment (More info?)

Hello,

Not sure which group to post this to, but I'll try here first and see what
happens.

Basically I need some advice or pointers to references regarding promoting a
server to be a domain controller.

This is the situation. We have a small AD domain consisting of 8 Win2k
servers. Two of these servers are DCs and DNS servers.
These servers are going to be retired as the h/w is no longer supported by
IBM or rather the maintanence for them is going to be to cost prohibitive,
so it equates to the same thing in the end. I have already built and
installed one of the new servers which will become one of the new DCs. This
server is running Win2k Server (Std) and was built as a non DC initially
whilst burnins and tests were done on it. I have since promoted it to be a
DC. This seems to have worked ok.

Now it was my understanding that with DC and AD all DC are equal, the
concept of primary and backup DCs is gone and is only applicable if your
running WinNT 4 or earlier, or if your running in a mixed mode environment.
We do not have any WinNT4 systems at all. Now what is confusing me a little
is I have since read that the 1st DC in a domain is different to other DCs
in that it is referred to as the master DC and actually has more roles than
additional DCs. The question is do I have to do anything special to transfer
these extra functions/roles the initial DC does to the other DCs within our
domain or can I just demote the DC to be retired and then switch it off?
It's just that in the past when that particular server had crashed, users
couldn't login depsite the fact the other DC was up and running which I
thought was rather odd at the time, but the server was only down for a small
period of time and we haven't had it crash since, and due to other work
commitments I've hadn't had a chance to follow up on it..until now.

Another issue I am a little confused about is the DNS side of things. The DC
are also our internal DNS servers. The first DC is the PDNS, whilst the send
DC is the SDNS. When I promoted the new server to be a DC it seemed to
install/activate the DNS server component. At the moment I have left the DNS
option unconfigured becuase I am not sure how to make it the primary DNS.
Any help here would also be appreciated.

So, basically I currently have theree servers as DCs

ServerA - Initial DC and PDNS server
ServerB - Second DC and SDNS Server
ServerC - Third DC and DNS Server

Basically I want to replace ServerA with ServerC.

So can anyone help me out here? References to articles would be most
welcome.

tia

Craig