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2000 Authentication Issue...

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by griz1975

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I have two sites, East-Coast and West-Coast. I have 2 Domain Controllers on the East-Coast and 1 on the West-Coast. I am finding that most of the people are authenticating on the West-Coast server when there are 2 local Domain Controllers working fine. Any changes that can be made in AD to resolve this issue?

5 replies

by timwalsh

Global catalog servers are critical to user authentication and log-ons. Could it be that your West-Coast server is the only Global Catalog serverin your domain? According to Microsoft, every site should have at least one Global Catalog server.

by griz1975

From MS Website:

"In the event that there is only one domain in the forest, all domain controllers contain the same data, so there is no need to locate a GC (even though any given server might be designated a GC)."

The GC is a local server, even though it doesn't matter. Odd how more clients authenticate on the remote DC rather than on one of the two local DCs. Odd, hope theres a preference setting somewhere.

by jon pratt

I'm guessing that your west coast server is the PDC-Emulator? If this is the case then all downlevel clients will authenticate to the west coast server. This assumes that you have downlevel clients. If this is not the case then you have a strangeproblem indeed. I have three WAN (T-1)links and each site's clients authenticate only on their local DC with the exception of downlevel clients. The only configuring that I did was the setup of site links and subnets in AD Sites and Services, however, this should only effect AD replication not which DC clients authenticate to. The only other theory that I can come up with(although it's fairly far fetched) is that you're connected through a TLAN(transparent LAN: the phone company literally connects you via 802.3 ethernet over the telcomm network) and are thus on the same subnet at both sites. However, that theory is extremely speculative.... Hope this helps. Good Luck.

by griz1975

I figured this out on my own...I need to make seperate sites for east coast and west coast, and assign the DC's accordingly. This should cut down the WAN traffic considerably. Thanks for the input tho.

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