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What’s New in 2008 R2 – Offline Domain Join

For as long as we have had Active Directory domains, we have been required to to join client to the domain while they were online and connected to AD. Without that the join would fail. Now you always had the ability to join with a script using the NETDOM command but with Windows Server 2008 R2 we can now join a client to our AD domain while offline. The real benefit hear is that there is no need to supply or enter domain admin credentials. As you’ll see below a TXT file is created but just for fun open it up with notepad and see what you can make out :)

It is a simple three step process that requires you to run a new utility called DJOIN from an already joined Server 2008 R2 computer.

Create a text file with DJOIN that contains the required information for a computer to join AD
Import the text file using DJOIN on the target computer you wish to join AD
Once connected to the domain, reboot the computer and it will join AD

For joining a computer to the domain using DJOIN there are some switches you need to know about first.

/provision – used when there is no existing AD account for the computer
/reuse – if you already created a computer account in AD and would like to use it
/domain – specifies the domain to join
/machine – specifies the name of the machine, if the computer has a different name it will be renamed
/machineou – specifies the OU to join, if you omit this it will automatically be placed in the default computers OU
/savefile – saves the file to be imported.

A typical command would be…