AD - NT DNS issue needs explanation

[keithja]

Good Morning,

I had a DNS (or perhaps WINS) issue over the weekend that I don't understand.

I need to give some background:

We are in the process of migrating an NT domain over to a Win2k3 AD domain. As part of that process, we created a secondary DNS server on the AD domain, setup replication with the AD PDC DNS, and then moved the IP address that was on the NT Domain's DNS server, to the secondary DNS server on the AD domain.

That's the background. Up until this past weekend, the original NT DNS IP (x.x.x.30) had been first in the DNS search order on NT DCs. Then this weekend, I moved the Primary AD DNS address (x.x.x.48) to the top of the search order and moved x.x.x.30 to place 2. I verified resolution of the 2 NT DCs and went home.

However this morning, we began getting reports of people being unable to log in to the NT domain and unable to connect to the domain with any of the domain management tools (user manager etc).

I changed the search order back and and all was well. However I don't understand what happened or why?

Can someone explain whats goin on here?
thx,
k