The joys of CC3 - machines not joining the domain during Smartclient

[FishCustard]

Oh the wonders of RM CC3 in 2013... it's all going away in the summer, you'd think it could hold together for another half-term!

 

*ahem*

Right, so recently machines have been failing to join the domain during the RM Smartclient process. You put the name/domain/location in, it restarts and then says 'cannot find domain school.internal'. The DC is fine, we can access it before the process begins (how else would we get the commissioning tools?!), and we can join plain XP clients to the domain fine.

 

Furthermore, the option to 'Rebuild Workstation' (any workstation) within the RMMC is greyed out. I've restarted the RMC3I service, no effect. I'm guessing something within one of the other RM services on the DC has gone up a certain creek, but have no idea where to start looking!

 

Any ideas on what to do next? I plan to try a rebuild using a floppy tomorrow, but doubt that'll have an effect.

Edited June 10, 2013 by FishCustard
clarification

[TomCox]

I did have a batch of PC's do this, I figured it was the NIC's taking a little too long to negotiate.

 

Do you have C:\RM\Install on the PC? There's a vbs file, makecc.vbs something like that - run it and see if that works? I've got a few machines I have to bump along like this now ...

[FishCustard]

Yep, I have that, I get that far, but it's once I've run that and rebooted that it fails. I've tried a couple of different machines, including a virtual machine running on ESXi and locally with VirtualBox, so a NIC issue seems unlikely.

[TomCox]

Ah sorry didn't follow properly, the only service I know about is the RMC3I one and I think a RM location services? Reboot the server? heh

[Arthur]

Are any of the NetLogon services on your CC3 DCs paused? Also worth checking is the date/time on the PC you are rebuilding.

[FishCustard]

Nope, I even restarted the NetLogon service for good measure. I'll double check the time, but as I'm able to add the same machines to the domain without RM in the way, I doubt it's a sync issue.

[FishCustard]

Seems like I've cracked it - when it reboots and complains 'can't find domain', if you enter the FQDN (schoolname.internal or the like) in the box where it actually asks for the NetBIOS name, it works.

 

This is rather odd, as I can join machines to the domain normally via the NetBIOS name.

 

The Smartclient logs (I had to hack the VBS scripts that the process uses in order to get at these - fancy disabling KB/mouse drivers in Safe Mode... wutwut?) show that the script can't enumerate the list of DCs properly as it can't resolve the (NetBIOS) domain name. I can't get any more info than that though...