We have a remote site with two 2008 R2 Domain Controllers - well, actually, it's now down to only one. This morning, the second DC up and died. As such, there was no opportunity to politely remove it from the domain. Further, there were no backups being taken of this domain controller (please don't judge), so we have nothing to go back to.
We would, however, like to have two domain controllers at this remote site, and the topic of "next steps" came up. We've been researching the steps for cleaning up old DC information from Active Directory, but that process seems to suggest that we're trying to get rid of something long gone. Since we want to get a second DC back in the mix, can we simply stand up a new server with the same name without freaking out Active Directory? The standing theory is that the new machine information (SID) will overwrite the old information when joined to the domain and subsequently promoted to DC status.
Of course, since this has not been tested, it's all just theory. The DC wasn't doing anything special other than being a global catalog server and hosting DNS.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? Do we need to do the cleanup even though we plan on introducing the same server back into the mix (albeit a *new* server).
Thanks in advance for everyone's time.
-Todd