I attempted to upgrade our corporate domain to Windows 2000 earlier (it failed for reasons not pertinent to this question). We had 1 PDC (the one being upgraded, obviously) and 2 BDCs on the network. One of the BDCs was taken offline in order to be able to roll back to NT if need be.
During the upgrade process (keep in mind only one BDC is now servicing authentication requests), some users were not able to log in to the domain, receiving the error that a domain controller could not be contacted. Is it possible these computers are trying to establish a secure channel with one of the domain controllers that was no longer online? Is there something I need to do on the domain or the client computers themselves in order to ‘force’ them to use this BDC for authentication?
Again, this happened on some workstations and not others. There didn’t seem to be any particular patterns (i.e. particular OSes, specific IPs, etc.)