Lately I have been
thinking about the following:
What happens
actually in Active Directory and what changes in it, while or after having
uninstalled Exchange.
I am asking this
because usually when I uninstall an Exhange server, I do this according to the
KB articles from Microsoft i.e. "How to remove the first Exhange
server".
After that I insert
the Exchange 2003 cd and do a 'remove components' (in case of Exchange 2000 I
remove it from within Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel).
After having done
that I go into ESM and delete the server object from there.
Recently I have had
a customer asking me to remove his first Exhange server and transfer everything
to another Exchange server. So I went along and followed the KB article up to
the point where I had to uninstall Exhange. Everything went
fine.
After that, before I
wanted to uninstall Exchange, I stopped the Exchange services and left this so
for a day, just to be sure kept on running right without the Exhange services on
the old server running.
This also went fine.
I then left the instruction with the customer how to uninstall Exchange and
delete the server object from within ESM. They want to do something themselves
also, they have their own IT department :-).
Instead of doing
that, they simply switched the server off and told me this a couple of days
later.
I offcourse told
them that Exchange needed to be uninstalled the way Microsoft says so but now
they want me to somehow prove what will happen if they do it as they
have always done it, simply remove the server object from within ESM and
not uninstalling Exchange from the server at all.
This Exchange
Organisation exists of several servers and several Administrative
Groups.
I know that in order
to uninstall Exchange you need the necessary rights on the Administrative Group
the server is in, so I guess that during the uninstall, the server 'unties'
itself from that Administrative Group.
But what happens if
you dont do this, are you then really stuck with pieces in AD of the 'not
properly uninstalled server'?
Lets ssay you would
not uninstall Exchange but you will remove the server object from within ESM and
then, much later you would bring that same server, not uninstalled, online
again. I guess you could end up with messy thing then. But I dont think
Microsoft says to uninstall Exchange because of this reason
only.
Is there
a program for AD like there is 'Snapshot' for the Windows
registry. A program which creates a 'before' and
'after' picture.
Or am I now thinking
too complex?
Can anybody who can
shed some light on what exactly is altered in AD when doing an uninstall of an
an Exchange server?
