Cannot promote member server to DC

[swil...@cromwells.co.uk]

We have an issue at the moment where we cannot promote an existing
member server on our Windows 2000 domain to a domain controller. The
history to this is as follows:

We had two domain controllers running Active Directory for a single
domain. There is only one domain in the forest. One of these machines
died (as in the disk failed and could not be recovered). Since then, I
created a new member server with a view to then promoting it to a DC.
However, I always get the following error message:

"The operation failed because:

Failed finding a suitable domain controller for domain cromwells.co.uk

The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted".

For obvious reasons we need to have a second domain controller in place
on this domain.

I've heard that this issue is because of incorrectly-configured DNS,
however we are not running DNS on any of the Windows servers on the
domain. The DNS is being run on a Linux server on the same LAN, which
is not part of the domain. This has been running the DNS without any
problems for at least two years.

Please, any ideas? Email swil...@cromwells.co.uk

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

I would agree it sounds like DNS. You can easily ascertain if that is the case
by doing a network sniff on the member server as you attempt to do the DCPromo.
If it is DNS you will see an attempt to look up some various DNS SRV records and
their failures, that will tell you exactly what DNS records are at fault, if you
get no DNS failures, it is obviously something else, at that point I would look
for TCP RST packets indicating some sort of network filtering is occurring on a
router, firewall, or the remote DC.

joe

--
Joe Richards Microsoft MVP Windows Server Directory Services
www.joeware.net