hI,
I am using Windows Server 2008 and I have to do a final migration from the Windows 2000 Server (demoted long ago). I have to transfer group, public and user files on the new server.
The only question I got about this is because since I am changing servers and the GPOs are attached to the old server shares in the GPOs, how can I change users' network drives pointers thru GPOs without anmy intervention on their computers, not even a relog, so I can avoid any form of downtime?
ie : I wanna change the pointer of the personal user's U: drive without asking the user to relog or even notice it. I'm going to change it from \OLDSERVER\users\%username% to \NEWSERVER\u\%username%
I know that there is DFS that avoids this thing and it's gonna be implemented after the migration.
Thanks
Just have the users logoff and logon again. You're trying to make this too complicated for not a lot of payoff. I'm all for doing things transparently but there's a point of diminishing returns (and you could've done this in a way as to have the new server computer end up with the same name as the old server computer, but you didn't).
You can use a NetBIOS alias. You don't need to make any changes to clients (see How to Configure Windows Machine to Allow File Sharing with DNS Alias for a pretty good writeup) in order to use it to my knowledge.
If you don't have DFS I don't think their is any way that you are going to change drive mappings with a GPO without the user noticing.
You might be able to make this with a DNS aliases, but as I understand it, you have to apply a change to all the clients first that will require a reboot.