AD remote administration

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Sullivan
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M

Mike Sullivan

Hello gurus. I've built an experimental network or three
Win2K, one W2Kpro and two Advanced Server acting as DCs.
I've been trying to study how to administer the network
remotely and have a problem. My understanding that any DC
can serve as the DC for the domain. However, only when a
particular of the two DC's is running can I perform remote
administration from the workstation; nor can I run the AD
tools on the other DC. On both machines I get a AD
dialog: "Naming information cannot be located because: The
specified domain does not exist or could not be
contacted." As far as I have been able to determine DNS
is running on both DCs. Any thoughts on what I'm doing
wrong or don't understand? --- Mike Sullivan
 
Mike,

Do you get any event id errors? Have you installed the Support Tools and
ran both dcdiag /v and netdiag /v? The Support Tools are located in two
places: on the WIN2000 Server CD in the Support | Tools folder and on the
WIN2000 Service Pack CD in the Support | Tools folder. I would use the
Service Pack if possible.

Have you done the usual tests? Can you ping each of the DCs from the other?
from the Workstation? All three ways - IP Address, NetBIOS name and DNS
name? What does nslookup tell you? Take a look at DNSLint as well. This
may very well be a DNS issue. A lot of things are! Both DCs are running
DNS? Is it Active Directory Integrated DNS? Do you have it set up to
'allow dynamic updates'? Do you have the four sub folders ( meaning, the
_msdcs, _sites, _tcp and _udp )? Try running a netdiag /fix as this will
usually resolve that issue ( if any are missing ). There are a couple of
other ways as well but this is really simple.

I suppose that you have installed the Adminpak on the Workstation? Or, are
you using RDP with the two DCs running Terminal Server in Remote Admin Mode?

If you installed the Adminpak, have you tried to connect to both DCs? It
has been awhile since I have done this using that method, but IIRC you need
to connect to the DC of your choice.

Are the five FSMO Roles available? Once you install the Support Tools all
you need to do is to enter netdom query fsmo. This may not directly have
anything to do with your issue but let's verify.

HTH,

Cary
 
Hi Cary, I'll give your suggestions a try and let you know
what happens. Thanks for the suggestions. --- Mike
 
Cary,

I can ping both servers from the workstation (WS) by IP,
NetBios and FQDN. I performed this test twice; once with
each DC powered-up and powered-down. Does this tell me
that DNS is working on each server or might the resolution
of name/ip come from a cached set of values?

I've not yet got to the dcdiag or netdiag yet but will
tomorrow. Thanks for helping. --- Mike
 
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