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In a school I manage there is going to be some major work done in the room the servers are located, of all rooms in the entire building.

I have agreed with the school that the staff are not coming in and the network will be unavaialble. That is not the problem.

The problem I have is I don’t know what to do for the best..

Do I just leave the domain controllers off and put away safely? or do I try to keep them on somewhere else in the building?
The problem is I am not going to be on site, you can’t trust any contractor or anyone else that might be there, and I can’t guarantee that there won’t be cleaning, other works and the power may be interrupted in other rooms. Plus schools are terrible for space the only options I have are empty classrooms but these can be quite hot rooms in this building, especially if they are all closed off for the summer.
There’s a chance I try to move them and keep them on, and they end up going off anyway (they do have a UPS that will safely shut them down)

I know I won’t have any issues with tombstoning, or replication timeouts (the 60 day thing), and the machines will be safer powered off. But what happens when the machine is powered up and suddenly jumps 3 weeks into the future, DHCP leases/DNS entries etc.

Do I need to do anything to prep, what do you guys recommend, just power off and leave them?

This is only for 3-4 weeks max

14 Spice ups
2

Hi Richard,

Please take bare-metal backup in an external HDD and shutdown the DC. Please take export of DNS and DHCP in excel and take Backup. If it is a VM Take full backup of VM. Mark the network and FC connections to server if available and take a note of password and IP address as you are shutting down server for long time.

4 Spice ups
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If they are all off, here are the issues you may see, but none are critical.

  • DHCP lease confusion (Clients will just request new ones. No big deal).
  • DNS scavenging issues (if enabled, some stale records might be purged. But clients will re-register).
  • Kerberos ticket expiry (but these are short-lived anyway). No issues
  • Event log timestamps being out of sync. (As long as the DCs sync with a reliable NTP source, they’ll correct themselves).

If you’re confident no one needs domain services during the downtime, this is the safest and cleanest option.

14 Spice ups
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How many DCs are there ?
Would there be dust ?
Are there any other Servers or appliances that requires DCs ?

We did have a major renovation once so what I did was to have BIOS power up DCs at 2000hrs then a scheduled task to “shutdown” at 0700hrs for both DCs ?

3 Spice ups
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Hi. There’s 2 DCs, second is just a DC/DNS (i.e all FSMO / DHCP are on one box) There will be dust, there’s major dry rot under the floor. The servers will be well out of the room they are currently in.
There is a potential place further up in the building that I could leave them powered on, but I can’t guarantee someone else won’t go in and move stuff, or unplug stuff.

It’s whether I try to keep them on, or just store them and keep them physically safe. It’s more for the DC side of it, replication etc, there is a file/print server that will remain off but that’s just a member that will be absolutely fine.

As far as the staff/management are concerned they know the network is down, It’s not that I have to keep them on for business.

4 Spice ups
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This would be my preference.

It’s the least impactful.

You’ll still have ~5 weeks to fix it should there be an issue, though I don’t foresee any.

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Thanks. That is what I am thinking. No one expects it to work, and there is only the phone system that will impact (they use DHCP to get the provision URL) but no one will use the phones anyway so that is no problem.

I could try all sorts of things to power them up and keep them running, but ultimately they could end up being turned off anyway or these contractors knock off the power, the UPS would shut them down but my concern would be security, dust and heat.

I will probably just delete all the DHCP leases before I turn them off, which would prevent stale ones but like you say the clinets will just get a new one.

It was more to try and keep the DCs working and in sync, but I am turning both off so it won’t see one missing for 2 weeks, the OS will do nothing when off, it was just that sudden jump to the future I was concerned about

All data is backed up off site, and to be fair it is only a small domain.

Thanks

3 Spice ups
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If both are off, nether will see each other anyway. When you bring them back online, they’ll shake hands, welcome each other back from their break and resume work.

5 Spice ups
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Keep in mind you will be weeks behind on OS updates when you come back, so leave some fudge time for startup…

4 Spice ups
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OP can mitigate much of this by making the DC’s the last things online, letting leases expire before shutting down, or forcing them to expire, same with DNS scavenging, force the purge.

2 Spice ups
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I’m up to date with July, next aren’t due til the 12th August, so that won’t be a problem. I do updates manually anyway and always wait a week or 2 as microsoft have a track record of breaking something each patch Tuesday

3 Spice ups
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From an OS/domain perspective, there is no concern. If the network doesn’t need to be functional, you can shut it all down.

Make sure you know about any service dependencies for startup order (DHCP reservations, for example).

I would think the biggest concern will be the hardware’s age, and whether it will power up after an extended outage. Also protecting the equipment from ingesting any dust while it’s off. Drywall dust is incredibly harmful to electronics.

Also, make sure you have good/tested backups. Just in case.

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The hardware is only 15 months old. I’ll power down and store safely somewhere covered up.

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Even better if you still have the original boxes with packaging materials!! We used to do 3-year lease cycles with IBM, they “required” we ship everything back in the original packaging…somehow, we always ended up with a few boxes missing for some reason…

2 Spice ups
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At least you will not get calls as to why users have issues…heehee

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Short story…

I been at my job for 9 years now. In all that time we have NEVER shut the entire data center down for ANY period of time.

We did a re-organization of the data center about 6 months ago. We shut EVERY THING down for about 6 hours. We had off and on issues with things for about 2 weeks before things settled. We fought with NAC, we fought segmentation, we fought A/V…things we never thought we’d need to deal with.

Though the DCs may be fine being off for 4-5 weeks…other things in your environment might not be happy about it.

Be prepared.

2 Spice ups
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Situations are different of course everywhere, in this case it is a basic network, 2 DCs, file/print server and a handful of clinets. No one logs in remotely, and if a PC is switched on during the downtime it simply won’t work and whoever didn’t read the email would have to go home!
They are not linked to other sites, they are not member domains of somewhere else, really I don’t even need 2 in this situation (but I always install 2 DCs where possible)

With the comments I have had, the consensus is shut down and store safe. I could move to another room but I could risk someone coming and messing around.

There might be some iPads floating around but otherwise nothing else uses the network out of hours.

3 Spice ups
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Thank you for all the comments and support. It was just one of those things that was bothering me all week, do I turn off or do I try and keep them on. It was never for the end users, just for the servers.

The hardware is not old and they will be safer off locked up and covered away from any building work.

3 Spice ups
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And you should, it’s best practise, to protect the domain.

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Just power down, move, and keep unplugged. The e tended downtime isn’t an issue.when powering back up, power on your networking equipment first… switches, firewalls, etc. Then power on DCs, then other stuff.

There’s nothing you need to do to prep DCHP. Backups are always a good idea, but that’s true even if there was no work going on.

2 Spice ups