We are a business that is still impacted by Hurricane Sandy. We have been displaced and operating at out co-lo site since the storm. It was just a site to hold our replicated backup appliance but when theres a will theres a way.
The home office and network are still without power. We had one physical AD server which held all the roles..(AD1) and one virtual AD2. When tasked to recover the network and provide remote access to it it was much easier to recover a virtual server (AD2) and promote it to all roles. The trouble is what was supposed to last only a month is now going to go on until July 2013.
So in short I will have 2 copies of my AD...one that was my production AD when the storm hit and one that we have recovered and have had issues with. Even tho I recovered the day of the storm with my copy of AD2 the active directory it contained was somehow over 8 weeks old. Servers had to be rejoined to the domain and users that were added before weren't there. Security changes made in the prior 8 weeks had to be redone. Things seem to be stable now.
Here's the issue. What do I do when I go back to the office? Call what I'm working with now PRODUCTION and deal with any issues or is there someway to "merge" the two AD? If I go back to my "office AD" what happens to any user ID's I've created..obviously AD won't have them but Exchangel will? Will they be orphaned ID's I can attach to a new ID and retrieve the users mail?
We will have been running for over 9 months is a "disaster mode". What will happen when AD1 gets powered up? Will Kerberos and certs be all messed up or will it just act like nothing happened??
Appreciate and thoughts/ideas one may have..
Tom McCarroll