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Domain Controller dead :(

jamin100

By jamin100
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jamin100

jamin100

Posted
Posted (edited)

Had some big problems with my DC this week . . .

 

1st off one of the hard drives in the RAID failed. Not too bad as the server is still under warranty so I call an engineer out to get the new hard drive in. He brings out 2 new HD's and replaces them both. He ghosts the working origional working HD to one of the new HD's and sets up the RAID but it wont boot.

 

He tries a few other things but still no joy. Then today he ghosts the old working drive to both the new hard drives and pops them in and we think thats solved the problem as the server now boots and the RAID manager at startup reports no faults and that both drives are responding.

 

On the server there is a MEGAraid IDESPY program that is a simple app that reports the status of the raid. red for fubar, yellow for an error and green for ok. we expected this to be yellow and say rebuilding but it doesnt. It thinks that there is an error with the RAID array. Possibly a false positive the engineer leaves as the DC seems to be working ok. Then about an hour later it BSOD's. I wasnt working on it but one of the admin staff were runing CMIS.

 

It reboots and i get it back online and the same thing happens about 40 minutes later, this time with no one using CMIS. it seems to be complaining about intelsmb.sys.

 

So the server has now got to go back to Tempus so that they can investigate further. If it wasnt under warrenty then i'd do it myself. . . . .

 

Moved DHCP across to another server but now login seems really slow, anyone have any ideas?

 

the dead DC had the folowing roles

 

AD (replicated with other DC)

DNS (replicated with other DC)

DHCP (moved to other DC)

CMIS

SOPHOS EM

 

just isnt my week, have ofsted coming next Tuesday too !!!

 

EDIT: just a note, i havn't moved the DHCP records just created a new scope with the same range on the working DC

Edited by jamin100
Butuz

Butuz

Posted
Posted
brings out 2 new HD's and replaces them both. He ghosts the working origional working HD to one of the new HD's and sets up the RAID but it wont boot.

 

What??? Why on earth did he destroy the existing raid array by replacing both hard drives at the same time? He should have just replaced the faulty drive and then gone into the raid bios and set it to rebuild.

 

Butuz

jamin100

jamin100

Posted
  • Author
Posted
What??? Why on earth did he destroy the existing raid array by replacing both hard drives at the same time? He should have just replaced the faulty drive and then gone into the raid bios and set it to rebuild.

 

Butuz

 

No idea . . he said that there was a fault with the drives as they have seen this happen before and are now changing drive models.

 

we did have 2 x 200gb drives now we have 2 x 250gb drives.

 

There WD drives and the RAID controller is on the actual hard drive and not the MB or a dedicated card

jdh201

jdh201

Posted
Posted

Well, from reading this it looks like the set up either a software or an cheap desktop computer class raid setup on a pair of IDE drives. I wouldn't even recomend running something like that for a home user. They brought out two 250s because the 200s probably weren't available anymore and it was all they could get.

 

My first recomendation would be to buy a real server with a hardware raid controller running either scsi or sas drives. I just bought a pair of off lease HP ML370 G3s for two side customers. They were around $500 US and had 6 72.8 gig Ultra 320s, redundant colling, and redundant power supplies. If a drive fails you should replace it with a matching drive, most real servers even prefer you to hot swap them (don't try that with your box though). As for your DC, that box is probably dead. Microsoft has a step by step document for moving all the DC roles to another server.

How to replace single domain controller in domain with a single domain controller? As for DHCP, I moved all my dhcp to my switches and took it away from MSFT. I had problems with clients moving between VLANs and getting assigned the address for the vlan they moved from and not the vlan they were on. But you will probably need to do an ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew to get them to pick up the new DHCP server.

m25man

m25man

Posted
Posted

You say you have Sophos EM installed.

What clean up settings do you have set in the server or default policies?

 

Do Nothing?

Delete?

Move to Folder

Move to Central Location?

 

Please let us know..

jamin100

jamin100

Posted
  • Author
Posted
You say you have Sophos EM installed.

What clean up settings do you have set in the server or default policies?

 

Do Nothing?

Delete?

Move to Folder

Move to Central Location?

 

Please let us know..

 

Do nothing

scan on write for workstations

scan on read for servers

DAckroyd

DAckroyd

Posted
Posted
There WD drives and the RAID controller is on the actual hard drive and not the MB or a dedicated card

 

Why do you not have HDD's for servers in your server?!?

 

have you thought of looking into virtualising - those services on the old server would be best off split appart a little (give CMIS it's own server - sort of thing you don't want to die!)

jamin100

jamin100

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Why do you not have HDD's for servers in your server?!?

 

have you thought of looking into virtualising - those services on the old server would be best off split appart a little (give CMIS it's own server - sort of thing you don't want to die!)

 

Money is the main factor in all this,

 

I put 3 proposals to the head and advised him that we needed to go down the visualization route..

He chose the cheapest option though :(

 

At least now we have a new head

DAckroyd

DAckroyd

Posted
Posted
Money is the main factor in all this,

 

I put 3 proposals to the head and advised him that we needed to go down the visualization route..

He chose the cheapest option though :(

 

At least now we have a new head

 

you also have a good argument to go with virtualisation rather than cheap servers now - you should be able to sit some vitual servers on your existing kit as long as it's of a high enough spec - add some shared storage and you'll get a lot more redundant system

  • Thanks 1
jamin100

jamin100

Posted
  • Author
Posted
you also have a good argument to go with virtualisation rather than cheap servers now - you should be able to sit some vitual servers on your existing kit as long as it's of a high enough spec - add some shared storage and you'll get a lot more redundant system

 

Yeh - not sure these "servers" would handle it. Would defiantly need more RAM

 

Server 1 - xeon dual core 3.0ghz 2 GB RAM RAID 5

server 2 - xeon dual core 3.0ghz 2GB RAD RAID 1

DAckroyd

DAckroyd

Posted
Posted

they may do the trick - quick search on misco has ECC DDR2 4GB for £80.

 

might be worth getting as quote from someone to see what you could do with your exisiting kit and a couple of copies of 2008 enterprise server (enterprise gives you Hyper-V and 4 V-PC licences)

jamin100

jamin100

Posted
  • Author
Posted

might be worth getting 2 new servers though ;)

 

question - If i did go the server 2008 route would i have to re-buy all my CAL's as these are for server 2003.

DAckroyd

DAckroyd

Posted
Posted
other route would be ESXi but you'd still need extra server licences for the VM's to increasing the servers and buying server 2008 enterprise is the cheapest way to do that
ICT_GUY

ICT_GUY

Posted
Posted

And after checking my drives, if anyone can guess if they are affected they can have a cookie*.

 

 

 

*It will only be a spare third party tracking cookie though.

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