Problem Description:

How to migrate NIS Server from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2?

Solution:

if there is only one NIS Server in your environment, make sure you follow the procedure mentioned below:

1. Promote another server as NIS Subordinate Server.
2. Convert that into Master NIS Server.
3. Start the migration process on the original server.

NOTE: Master NIS Server must always be available.

Step 1. In our case we had a Subordinate NIS Server named DC1 running Windows Server 2003 already in place. So, we removed it from the list of NIS Servers. To do this, from Active Directory Users and Computers cleared the value of GECOS attribute under DC1 computer object’s properties. Since we wanted to promote a new DC with same name, we demoted it using DCPromo and ensured it’s metadata is cleaned up.

Step 2. Promoted a new 2012 R2 DC with same name as DC1.

Step 3. Installed Server for NIS on DC1 using following commands and reboot the server:

Dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:AdminUI

Dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:nis /all

Step 4. On DC1 ran > %WINDIR%\IdMU\Setup\Niscnfg.exe. Closed and reopened IDMU console and verified that underneath Server for NIS we could see DC1 as Windows Subordinate server.

Step 5. Ran > nisadmin DC1 mkmaster -d <domainname>. Closed and reopened IDMU console and verified that underneath Server for NIS, DC1 is configured as NIS Master server.

Step 6. To verify if we sere able to query NIS Maps using new Master Server, ran following command:

ypcat -k -d <DomainName> -h <HostName> <MapToQuery>

E.g. ypcat -k -d contoso -h DC1 passwd

Step 7. After we successfully performed above steps, repeated these steps on DC2 except Step 5 as we wanted to use DC2 as Subordinate NIS Server.

If you find Unix Attributes tab missing in Active Directory Users and Computers, run following commands

1. CD C:\Windows\idmu\common
2. Net stop “server for nis”
3. Regsvr32.exe /u nisprop.dll
4. Regsvr32.exe nisprop.dll
5. Net start “server for nis”