"Our Windows guys were still working on restoring the master Active Directory pair "
I was a Solaris admin at a previous employer. We ran annual DR exercises, and saw similar issues with the Windows kit. Even with months to prepare for the exercise, it took the entire exercise, sometimes longer, to bring 'Windows stuff' back to life.
What we (the unix team) did was to write into _our_ DR plan a few paragraphs on how to be up and running without DNS, or Active Directory.
I see DHCP, DNS and AD (in that order), at least in a windows environment as step one of anything.
Solaris was nice and easy to get back apart from one machine I dealt with: the starfire E10k. The SSP failed on one that we had and the entire system uses crypto key exchange so only the original SSP can bring the system up. Fortunately we had an E15k being installed at the time so it was an emergency migration job.
I miss big iron. I had an old maxed out 1000E and a disk tray full of 4.3Gb SCSI disks at home for a bit (until I got the electricity bill!)
"I see DHCP, DNS and AD (in that order), at least in a windows environment as step one of anything."
It gets _messy_ but I think it's worthwhile to write out in biz continuity plan how to function without DHCP, DNS, and AD.
Take my case: we sometimes had the tier 1 and 2 services (the unix-based ones at least) up _days_ before DNS and AD were available. In the real world the business can't wait for DNS and AD to have access to their tier one and two apps: customers are waiting for product.
Note that a lot of work went into getting the Solaris stuff to this point: in particular using ZFS and zones made the process or restoration a breeze. By the time of our fourth annual DR exercise, getting stuff up and running was essentially waiting for it to restore from tape, adjust for things like 'DNS y/n' and done.
I was a Solaris admin at a previous employer. We ran annual DR exercises, and saw similar issues with the Windows kit. Even with months to prepare for the exercise, it took the entire exercise, sometimes longer, to bring 'Windows stuff' back to life.
What we (the unix team) did was to write into _our_ DR plan a few paragraphs on how to be up and running without DNS, or Active Directory.