Can't reach VMware domain controller - help!

[OXP]

Hi all,

 

I'm having problem setting up a mini "test" network with what I have at home at the minute. I am still testing, tweaking and reconfiguring staff laptops (actually some netbooks ) and want to test some GPOs without messing with anybody's files/profiles so I've installed XP on an empty netbook and set up a test DC in VMware... so far so good.

 

Now whenever I've done this before, I've set up AD/the domain controller role and left the DNS/DHCP stuff as I'm just testing it... admittedly, I've only done it once(!) but it seemed to work fine - the machines could find the domain etc. with no extra config needed.

 

This time it's casuing me nothing but trouble Doing what I did before, I try to connect the netbook to the domain - it moans that it can't find a domain controller for the domain. I tried with just MDE and MDE.local as the domain... no difference. Thinking I'd perhaps done it wrong and HAD set it up differently last time I set up DNS on the domain controller and pointed the laptop to the test servers IP address to see if that was the case.

 

Nope - same error message. Got me really frustrated so I gave in but would really like to get this tested within the next week if that's possible

 

Any ideas what the problem could be? DNS settings for Server 2003 on Vmware? Neither the test server or netbook are running any firewalls or security software at the moment so it's not that either.

 

Any help appreciated, as you can tell I am still very new to all of this (especially intiial setting up) and this is only my second time using Vmware

[OXP]

Never mind guys, I've sorted it! I feel stupid, turns out I *can* get things to work locally without having to mess with DNS or DHCP and all that messy stuff on the server, I just have to manually point the netbook to the servers IP address in the TCP/IP settings. I thought I had done this last night, but I'd pointed it to the routers IP address instead, hence totally missing out the server completely... hence not being able to connect to the DC

 

All working now