I may have mentioned that my company is in the process of moving over to a new domain. We're using a very cool tool called CMT for Domains to help me in this process. During the testing and move over to the new domain I've been copying groups from the one NAB to the other so users don't see any differences with their access. CMT gathers all the groups and then I click a button and it copies all groups to the new domain. Sounds easy enough but I realized replication kept kicking in on the new domain before the groups could finish copying. So I whined to the Sr.Admin that I thought that was causing me issues. He said I could temporarily disable replication if I wanted to see if that sped the process up. I looked out there and decided I really didn't want to do it his way. I'm not sure why, but apparently sometimes I can be stubborn for no reason at all. So, on my own, I decided that if I just went out and deleted all the groups in the NABs and then copied it would have the same desired effect. And I was copying all the groups back in so it shouldn't hurt anything, right?! (In my defense I've been popping Laffy Taffy since 8am and spent about 2 seconds thinking about my grand plan before actually deciding that surely that would work just as well. Not an excuse, just stating the facts.) I'm sure there's several admins reading this now and shaking their heads because they know what I'm about to say next. No, I didn't realize anything was amiss until I realized that I couldn't access the admin server anymore on the new domain. Then I realized I couldn't access any of the servers on the new domain. I calmly turned to the senior and asked what would happen if I deleted all the groups. He laughed and explained that without localdomainadmins and localdomainservers we would like have pretty serious issues. The next few moments went something like this....
Me: "Oh...."
Him: "Why?"
Me: "Um...."
Him: "Why do you look like you might cry?"
Me: "Um... well.... "
Him: "Oh God, is that what you did?"
There was much laughing at my expense as he came over and bailed me out. We stopped domino on the admin server, pulled names.nsf from last nights backups and copied it over, ran fixup and updall from the command prompt (which was neat... I've never done that before either) and started domino again. The happy ending is all the groups are back in place and we can access our servers again.
My Sr.Admin sent me the following link and told me to read for a little while and then go home for the day instead of "helping" with anything else today.
He said it all while still laughing at me, but I decided my punishment should also include explaining to everyone that you can delete all the groups in a domain and still call yourself and Administrator as long as you can fix it before anyone notices. I hope anyone else new that might be reading this can learn from my mistake. Your Welcome.
