Hi there, First of all i'm not a expert techiehere so excuse me for my questions. My company have a several servers which are exchange, oracle server and a few more file server. Previously our domain controller is locatedon the old oracle7 server. Now that oracle 7server is no longer in use because the oracle server is having some hardware and old age problems so they bought a new server and upgraded it to oracle9i server. So we no longer going to use that oracle7+domain server.Now my boss is planning todeploy a newdomain controller on our existing Exchange 2003 Server. So my questions are can we do that on an existing Exchange Server?Will the exchange server settingsremainor we have to reconfigure again as it would have some conflicts between them?

Promoting a member server already installed with Exchange 2003 to a DC is not a supported operation. For a good explanation of this and a number of reasons why Exchange and DCs should be on separate servers see: http://blogs.brnets.com/michael/archive/2005/01/24/319.aspx Tony www.activedir.org

Thanks tony for the information and sorry for the late reply. Anyway i've went through the link and i actually don't really understand some of the service stop part between the DC and the Exchange services. And what is a GC? Thanks again..

A GC is a Global Catalog server. It's basically a Domain Controller (DC) that is configured to host read-only copies of all of the forest partitions. For example,let's sayyou have two domains in the Forest called DOM1 and DOM2. Before a DOM1 DC becomes a GC, it has the following partitions: Schema Configuration Domain (DOM1) and possibly application partitions (Windows 2003). When the DOM1 DC becomes a GC, it will have the following partitions: Schema Configuration Domain (DOM1) Domain (DOM2 - read only) and possibly application partitions (Windows 2003). While all objects within the forest are stored in a GC, not all attributes areavailable. Those that are are known as the partial attribute set (PAS). The PAS is configurable. The GC listens on port 3268 instead of the default LDAP port of 369. Tony

Many thanks for the explanations