Promote 2nd server 2003 when the 1st server 2003 was down

It you are planning to bring a server down then you can TRANSFER the FSMO roles between servers, prior to taking a server down. In the event of an unexpected failure you can sieze the FSMO roles and have the run on the  new server, however this is not necessary unless the other server is likely to be down for some considerable time and should not be done if the other machine is likely to be brought back on line. http://www.petri.co.il/transferring_fsmo_roles.htm

You shoud however make sure that both DCs are Global catalogs - go to Administrative Tools, Active Directory Sites and Services, Expand ,Sites, Default first site and Servers. Right click on the new server and select properties and tick the Global Catalog checkbox. (Global catalog is essential for logon as it needs to be queried to establish Universal Group Membership)

if you want full redundancy then if DHCP is set up them you must make sure both DHCP Servers are set up with appropriate scopes and not giving duplicate addresses. Assuming you are using AD integrated DNS, you also need to make sure that clients have the address on one DC as the Preferred DNS Server and the other as the Alternate DNS Server then they will query the second DNS Server automatically if the first one is off-line.

However, I repeat that it should not be necessary to sieze the FSMO roles unless it it likely that the other server will be permanently out of service. http://www.petri.co.il/seizing_fsmo_roles.htm

My company running 3 servers. All of the servers are not redundant, all of them are running using single hdd as system and data (the old IT guys installed the servers and now they already resign).

I want to make the servers more redundant by installing new server. I want to move all the Users, files, securities setting to the new server then I will remove all old servers).

First my plan is duplicate the file server. Any suggestion?

yes that seems to go a good one. you can use robocopy or xcopy for that or use can use backup taped for tht.

Hope this helps
Cheers:)
Kamal

I want to replicate the old file server and then replace it with the new file server.

What I want to do is to install new server then join to the old server, do the ad replication then file replication. But I don't know the step to do that. Any suggestion for me? or maybe web page that I can browse to?

I got an error "RPC server is unavailable" if I want to connect to dns server.

I can ping the dns server without any problem, even I can browse into the server.

What had happen? What should I do?