Active Directory Problem
S J Dailly
Hardware: Gigabyte GA-6VXP ATX board running at 100MHz, VIA 639A chipset
(PnP OS is activated)/ Pentium 3 550/ 128Mb RAM (100MHz)/ Diamond PCI vga
card/ V.90 modem/ 2x 390Gb Maxtor HDD/ 20Gb Colorado tape
Mission: File server & Domain Controller - clients rising to 10, mainly
running Windows 2000 Pro
Problem: Configuring Active Directory/ Setting as Domain Controller
Windows sets up with no obvious difficulties.
Problems arise when attempting to configure Active Directory and set the
computer as a Domain Controller. I've tried several variations on the
procedure, for example, selecting 'Domain' in the initial setup, running the
Configure Your Server wizard and running DCPromo from a command prompt, but
the same thing always happens:
Windows goes through the lengthy process of setting up DNS and DHCP (once
this gave error 0x80070424) and finally finishes. It either automatically
reboots or prompts me to reboot.
When the machine restarts it is impossible to log on to the Domain, either
because 'Netlogon is not started' or it 'can't find the Domain'. It is
possible to log in to the computer itself. In My Network Places, the Server
appears inside the Domain, so it seems to have been created; however, when I
go to Administrative Tools | Active Director Users And Computers, the Domain
is not recognised.
I don't know how to troubleshoot this. My best guess is that it's something
to do with DNS name resolution, but I don't know how to diagnose or correct
it.
The Help file suggests using a programme called 'netdiag/debug' from the
command line, but I can't seem to access this either.
What I find so perplexing is that this error should occur 'out of the box'.
This computer itself appears stable and everything else that I've tried
(disk management, etc) works okay.
Thanks,
Steve