What can happen if a DC is switched off for an extended time

[speckytecky]

Our school is undergoing a full electrical rewire now. The contractor agreed to provide dedicated separate power to the server room but trying to remote in just now I see the DC listed as having been down for 35 hours. This could be just the fact that the contractor has killed power to the network switches that supply the server room. On the other hand it could b the servers have not had the power as promised.

 

What issues are we going to run into if it's the latter?

[FN-GM]

You should be ok, You will get some errors in the event log on the other domain controllers says they cant talk to it, but they should all sort themselves out.

[Geoff]

If there are lots of changes in AD it'll take a little while to replicate over when it first comes back up. It wont service logins until its in sync. In your situation this isn't very likely to be an issue though.

[jamesfed]

If it is a single DC on its own then you won't have any issues.

 

If you have more than one check replication is ok between them all, one other thing to check for is that the clocks are all in sync between your DCs.

[morganw]

I think you would only get problems if you turn off a DC for a length of time that exceeds the Tombstone Lifetime value in AD, which by default should be 60 days.

[Geoff]

Windows Server 2003 SP1 changed the tombstone to 180 days. Tombstoning only applies to deleted objects anyway.