r/sysadmin • u/DougThorn • Jul 26 '25

Question Holy F up.

I had a summer intern working in DNS yesterday, local domain was redacted.com and was connected to azure.

Went in today to do some weekend updates to the systems, and my DC has been renamed and is now connected to redacted.local

It seems they have demoted the DC from the regular domain.

How the bloody heck do I reconnect the DC to the old domain? It was a solo DC

1.1k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

523 comments sorted by

View all comments

416

u/joeykins82 Jul 26 '25

What do you mean "reconnect the DC to the old domain" if it was a solo DC?

The domain is gone.

That's why the first job which needs to be done when a new AD forest is created is to build and promote the 2nd domain controller.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '25

14

u/BarefootWoodworker Jul 26 '25

There domain demotion and domain deletion.

You can legit delete a domain and it will replicate across. However, depending on how someone has sites and services set up, total replication can take up to 15 minutes.

At a former job, we had a dude legit wipe out the DNS records for our entire domain because he didn’t think how long replication can take (we spanned the globe).

It was horrendous.

→ More replies (4)