Jorge,
Pretty much what Chris stated. I did not look at the links that he provided
but I am sure that the articles will be right on target. That youngster is
pretty good!!!!!
Anyway, there are two things here that you bring up.
First, you will need to have a back up of your current environment. You can
do this with backup software. Or some other method. You can look at
ntbackup - which does not cost anything as it is built-in to Windows 2000
Server. You would - at a minimum - want to do a backup of the System State.
This would take care of your Active Directory. If you had any user folders
/ files then you would probably want to do this as well. You can also look
at other software. Backup Exec from Veritas is pretty popular. It can be
expensive, though.
Second, having only one Domain Controller is possibly asking for trouble.
You would want to have a second Domain Controller. Although, for only 40
users / computers there might be some hesitation on the part of the 'Suits'
to spend the money. Anyway, you would simply load WIN2000 Server on that
machine. Then, initiate the Domain Controller promotion process by running
dcpromo. You would simply be adding an additional Domain Controller in an
existing domain. Once this is completed you would have your second Domain
Controller and, thus, redundancy. You would want to consider making this
second DC a DNS Server [ look into Active Directory Integrated DNS, or
Dynamic DNS (DDNS )] as well as a Global Catalog Server. Do not forget to
update your DHCP information so that it hands out both IP Addresses when
giving the clients the DNS Server information.
You would not have to worry about copying user account objects and computer
account objects and groups and the like over to the 'new' DC as this happen
automagically via Active Directory replication. This would be intra-site
replication. There is another that does not apply to your environment (
well, based on what you have written so far would not lead me to believe
that you have anything other that one location ).
HTH,
Cary