PDC not authenticating?

[tduplantis]

I have 1 PDC and 1 BDC in our main office, and 2 remote BDC's in the field. We have a couple of servers that have to have an account logged on at all times. It seems when I down my BDC the account on those two servers becomes invalid and if I try to relog on it says domain controller not found. Why wouldn't they authenticate to my BDC? And is it normal for an account to get disconnected from the network if it happened to authenticate to a BDC that went down?

 

[Jpoandl]

Yes, it is unusual to have connectivity problems if the BDC or PDC goes down. The whole point is that those servers can go down and that there are backups on the network to take over.

I would suspect that there is some type of problem with the domain controllers...maybe they aren't "talking" to the PDC? Are you sure that when you make an update on the PDC, the update can be seen on the BDC's?

But the above is very unlikely. You would have many event viewer error messages if this was the case.

Maybe you should check you TCP/IP settings on the problematic servers to make sure they are correct.

Also, where are your network services installed? If DNS/WINS and DHCP are on one DC and the DC goes down, you will have problems as described.

In a properly designed environent, you will be able to down the DC and still allow access to everyone. (If the PDC goes down, you will not be able to add or modify accounts unless you promote a bDC to PDC.)

Also, if you think the sevices are setup in a fault tolerant manner, check the event viewer for errors on the problematic servers. It should offer some clues.

-hope this helps...reply with more information... Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

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[tduplantis]

Actually, DHCP is on the BDC, and WINS is running on the PDC. I hardly ever see anything in event viewer besides the "domain controller not found" message.

Do you think I should move those services to seperate servers?

 

[Jpoandl]

You might want to make the services redundant. To do this, you would have to install WINS and DHCP on both server...

Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.esavio.com