Q: In Windows NT 4.0 Microsoft provided a utility called Setprfdc that could manipulate a machine’s secure channel setup. Is Setprfdc available in Windows Server 2003 and later?

A: Setprfdc isn’t available in  Windows Server 2008 or Windows 2003. Even if you tried to copy the tool from an NT system, it wouldn’t work. Preloading the DC’s IP address into the LMHOSTS file, another method Microsoft provided to set a machine’s secure channel to a certain DC in the NT days, doesn’t work either.

In Windows 2003 and later, you can use the Nltest command-line utility to manage secure channel setup. The following command points the secure channel of a machine named myfileserver to a DC named contosodc1 in the contoso domain:

nltest /Server:myfileserver /SC_RESET:contosocontosodc1