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Active Directory on Win2k or 2k3?

Posted by Cliff on from the which-is-the-safer-option dept.

lordbry asks: "I am a Windows admin for a major university in a business computing area (if we have problems, people might not get paid). We have a Windows NT Domain, and are planning to migrate to Active Directory. One of my co-workers is pushing for doing this under Windows 2003. I, however, feel that (as with any M$ product) we should not even consider using 2003 for production anything until there is an SP 2 or 3, and that we should go with AD under Windows 2000. Does anyone have any advice, arguments, or horror stories that could help me make my case to the rest of my group, all of whom are somewhere in the middle? Does anyone think that 2003 is the way to go?"

4 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. At my office by secondsun · · Score: 4, Informative

    We went to 2k3 around the time it was released. The response around the office is more or less, "Fuck chevy this thing's a rock".

    Fot shits and giggles we put it on a pentium 2 300 laptop with 300MB of ram, it was stable, fast, and useful. In all honesty it is a great prduct and a worthy successor to 2k.

    --
    There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
  2. Go with 2003 by Finni · · Score: 4, Informative

    Um. AD using Windows 2003 is the service pack for the version of AD using Windows 2000.
    It's not like they re-wrote it from scratch. Nor is it like AD (using 2000) is entirely new either; it was developed from the backend of Exchange's directory service, if I understand correctly.
    Go with 2003, I haven't read of any particular defects of either AD or the server OS features under 2003, compared to 2000. And yes, things like Volume Shadow Copy, or whatever it's called, may make your life as an admin easier. Certainly, if you're running IIS sites, you'll appreciate the security of IIS 6 more than IIS 5.

  3. Re:Word of advice.. by altp · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've loaded 33,000 into a Windows 2000 AD with some perl scripts I wrote. Takes several hours, but all went well.

    What type of problems did you encounter?

  4. Re:Don't believe the hype. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    Sorry for posting this anonymously but I cannot legally speak for my company. We are a major worldwide bank and after months of testing (including Microsoft) we went with 2003 and haven't looked back.

    I admit my first reaction was "Global infrastructure on a service pack 0 platform ????" but after spending some time on the system my view changed entirely.

    Go with w2k3. You won't regret it.

    ps I am personally responsible for finding bugs that some of the hotfixes fix ;-)