Master of my own domain

Every once in a while something weird happens and you remember that you can't stand some particular feature in a piece of software that you otherwise don't mind using. Like the domain joining functionality of Windows.

I booted up a machine yesterday only to find for some odd reason it couldn't authenticate to our domain. Network connectivity to the AD server was just fine, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this server couldn't auth to AD.

What I needed to do was simply "rejoin" the domain. I realize that there's very few times when this is necessary, but when you have to do it, it's a PITA, because Microsoft doesn't support such functionality. You have to join a WORKGROUP, reboot, then join a DOMAIN, then reboot again in order to simulate a "rejoin" to a domain.

Needless to say this is what I ended up doing and after the second reboot the server was able to auth to the AD server and all was well, but damn... Why'd it have to be so hard?

There's no mechanism for deleting a domain on a server, and that's got to be painful for companies going through mergers or acquisitions where server consolidation may be occuring that requires a set of machines to be reconfiguring to authenticate to a new domain yet not disturb the applications running on the machine by wipe and replace, which is another solution to this problem.

It's just frustrating, even though it doesn't happen all that often. When it does, you waste half an hour just rebooting machines. Would it really be all that difficult to add "rejoin domain" functionality? Or "delete domain membership" functionality?