Dual domain controllers

[torytechie]

Further to previous posts of mine relating to migrating active directory, I ran Adprep on the domain controller and then ran dcpromo on the 2008 server, as advised by many people on here.

 

http://http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008-r2/65103-migrating-ad-2008-r2.html

 

All appeared to be fine, we had the two domain cotrollers sitting side by side, the 2k3 DC working fine and the 2k8 DC sitting idle with nothing pointing at it.

 

 

We then get a week of reports where students, and only students, randomly cannot see the mapped network drives.

 

 

I then ran dcpromo again on the 2k8 server to demote it again.

 

Problem solved.

[chrisbrown]

Is the 2003 box a file server? Do you have scripts/GPOs telling your machines to map to \\contoso.com\FileShare?

 

When you dcpromo a member server, it adds to the A record for your domain (and a bunch of srv records to) the details for the server. For instance, currently you have something like this:

 

DC2k3 (Server 2003).

 

Your A record for contoso.com contains one entry only; DC2k3. Anybody pinging or doing an nslookup against your internal DNS looking for contoso.com is being returned the IP of DC2k3. When you introduce DC2k8 to the scenario, another A record is added for contoso.com (thus enabling round robin). When a user requests contoso.com, the DNS will give back either one of the two servers' IP addresses. If you have drives mapped to the domain name and haven't used DFS to handle it, you will run into issues.

 

Can you confirm that the drives are mapped to different servers?

 

Also, do a "dcdiag /c /q /s:DC2k3" and "dcdiag /c /q /s:DC2k8" against each DC (obviously you'll need to re-dcpromo 2k8 at some point to do so). This will tell of any critical errors that may be occurring.

 

Chris

[torytechie]

The 2003 box is a Domain Controller with print services and AD domain services on.

[36Degrees]

I ran Adprep on the domain controller.

 

Also did you run adprep /forestprep and then adprep /domainprep? The forestprep is required to amend the AD schema.

[torytechie]

Also did you run adprep /forestprep and then adprep /domainprep? The forestprep is required to amend the AD schema.

 

Yes, I cycled through the ADPREP /forestprep, ADPREP /domainprep, ADPREP /domainprep /gpprep etc...