Issues with two DC's on a network?

[JHendricks123]

Hi guys,

I have a question related to Domain Controllers co-existing on a network, and forgive me I have not been through MCSE training or I would already know the answer

My company has two existing domain controllers that I know of. One in the US office, and one at headquarters in Denmark. The Danish DC is at the top of the food chain for sure.

What I would like to do, is setup a standalone domain controller in a portable server rack for use at tradeshows so that we can use AD users/groups authentication in our software even at shows.

The catch is that the rack needs to be connected to our network here in the US from time to time for maintenance and for remote software install by our team in Denmark. Of course, I don't want the DC in the tradeshow rack to have any effect at all on our existing network and domain.

Our existing domain is milestone.dk. If I dcpromo my server and set it up with a completely different root domain name like milustradeshow.com, will this kill our domain and get me fired?

[nmX.Memnoch]

It shouldn't hurt anything.

Just keep in mind that you want it to have a static IP address since it's a DC. The only thing I can see that could potentially be a problem is a DHCP server. If you use DHCP on the tradeshow laptops/workstations then you'll have to figure out how you want to handle your DHCP server. Obviously you don't want to have to reconfigure your entire network setup at the main office. One way to remedy this would be to just use static IPs on the tradeshow client machines and then you can skip a DHCP server all together.

I would recommend just using a private IP range (192.168.x.x). This may make it a bit more difficult for the Denmark team to do remote maintenance/installs though.

[JHendricks123]

Thanks Memnoch,

That's exactly what I wanted to hear! I was pretty sure that it shouldn't cause any problems as long as I don't try to associate it with the MILESTONE domain. Our tradeshow rack has 3 application servers and 4 client servers, all of which I have designated static IP's within our class B network, so I don't bother running DHCP for the show rack. The only other service I'm running is DNS, and our company DNS server is setup as the forward lookup zone and seems to work just fine.

Thanks again