Tips on using Active Directory Service

We're continuing to highlight some of the important concepts of the Windows 2000 Active Directory Service (ADS) to help you in planning your upgrade from Windows NT 3.5, 3.51 or 4.0.

The good news is that upgrading your network to Windows 2000 and ADS doesn't have to be a one-shot, all-or-nothing move. Windows 2000 supports a mixed environment of Active Directory domain controllers and Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers, so you can migrate at the pace that best fits your business needs.

Clients won't notice the change and will think they are accessing Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers. Clients that don't have new ADS access software (such as Windows NT Workstation, Windows 95, Windows 3.1x and DOS) can log on to Active Directory domain controllers by continuing to use Windows NT LAN Manager challenge/response authentication - just as they did with NT 3.51 servers.

This backward compatibility lets you migrate domain controllers before you migrate clients, or you can migrate a combination of servers and clients - whatever works best for you. The process does not require a mass migration to the new operating system version on either servers or clients. It is also not necessary to take a complete domain offline to migrate domain controllers or clients.

Individual domain controllers are unavailable only during their operating system update. This lets you migrate to the Active Directory without interrupting your business.

However, it's important to remember that LAN Manager challenge/response authentication is not as secure than NT Server's authentication, and much less secure than Active Directory's kerberos-based authentication. Therefore, the best plan is to move with deliberate speed on the upgrade while staging it in chunks as necessitated by staffing, budget and other business needs.

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