New Djoin.exe utility in Windows Server 2008 R2

Active Directory Documentation Team : bNew/b Djoin.exe utility in b…/b « Windows 7 Live Info

Wed, 27 May 2009 03:08:54 GMT

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re: New Djoin.exe utility in Windows Server 2008 R2

lmundy — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:12:59 GMT

The entire process for joining the domain offline seem to work flawlessly, however, once you have joined the domain and restarted you are still stuck in as much as you can't login as you have no cached credentials, and the only way to get thenm is if you have access to a domain controller to process the logon. This requires you to be physically connected to the domain. Hence, you might as well wait until you are locally network attached to the domain and join in the normal manner.

If I'm missing something here please let me know.

re: New Djoin.exe utility in Windows Server 2008 R2

Justin [MSFT] — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:47:28 GMT

Hi lmundy,

Thank you for the comment. You are not missing anything. The ODJ does not enable logon without network connectivity to a domain controller. I asked the djoin.exe developer about your comment and he replied that "to collect and apply the additional state to enable logon would require additional feature work, probably in more than just ODJ. There have been discussions on this but currently there isn’t any work planned by our team."

So the main benefit today is to reduce the time required and streamline the process for the domain join itself, and to frontload the domain join so if there are any problems with it, they might be exposed and resolved before the new domain client is rolled out in production environment.

We had feedback from some organizations that want to enable scenarios where they are rolling out 1000 VMs in a datacenter and they want to achieve this in an hour. In some cases the domain join itself was adding several minutes to each VM rollout, so cumulatively the domain joins could impede the high-speed, wide-scale rollout.

I think this is one of the main scenarios that djoin.exe was initially intended to target (as opposed to enabling a broader offline working scenario). I think the intent is that the next generation of System Center products will leverage it also.

But it's great to see customers finding it useful for their own scenarios as well, and for their feedback about how it can be improved.

Sincerely,

Justin