It looks like in the past there were some two improperly decommissioned Domain Controllers (DC1 and DC2) that belonged to this domain. I am concluding this based on some remaining records in the domain's _msdcs.contoso.com
DNS zone, mostly NS records and an A records under the gc
subdomain.
There are no Active Directory objects for the old domain controllers that I can see, either in OU=Domain Controllers,DC=contoso,DC=com
in Active Directory Users and Computers or NTDS settings in Active Directory Sites and Services that I can delete as suggested in Clean Up Server Metadata.
If I try to use ntdsutil to remove the orphaned domain controller's metadata I get the following error:
metadata cleanup: remove selected server dc1
Binding to localhost ...
Connected to localhost using credentials of locally logged on user.
LDAP error 0x22(34 (Invalid DN Syntax).
Ldap extended error message is 0000208F: NameErr: DSID-031001D1, problem 2006 (B
AD_NAME), data 8350, best match of:
'CN=Ntds Settings,dc1'
Win32 error returned is 0x208f(The object name has bad syntax.)
)
Unable to determine the domain hosted by the Active Directory Domain Controller
(5). Please use the connection menu to specify it.
If I try and manually select the server so I can remove it I find that it is not listed:
select operation target: list servers in site
No active site list
select operation target: list domains
Found 1 domain(s)
0 - DC=contoso,DC=com
select operation target: 0
select operation target: select domain 0
No current site
Domain - DC=contoso,DC=com
No current server
No current Naming Context
select operation target: list sites
Found 2 site(s)
0 - CN=CONTOSO-JNU-HQ,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com
1 - CN=CONTOSO-JNU-DEPO,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com
select operation target: select site 0
Site - CN=CONTOSO-JNU-HQ,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com
Domain - DC=contoso,DC=com
No current server
No current Naming Context
select operation target: list servers in site
Found 2 server(s)
0 - CN=DC3,CN=Servers,CN=CONTOSO-JNU-HQ,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com
1 - CN=DC4,CN=Servers,CN=CONTOSO-JNU-HQ,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com
It is a pretty small domain - I can go through the _msdcs.contoso.com
zone and manually identify the old DNS records and delete them.
Is there any reason why I shouldn't do this?