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NT or routing issue?

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9 replies

by craig it mangaer 1 view

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I am upgrading all the PC's and servers to Windows 2000. Everything was going fine on the WS side until I moved the PC's to a different subnet than the PDC(an NT4.0 box). Now the machines are listed as not available and the endusers are unable to change their passwords. There are two domain controllers on their subnet and I can ping the PDC and connect to network drives on the PDC with net use commands. But the PDC is not visible of course in My network places. 1, will this go away once the PDC& BDC's are win2k? 2,What is the best solution to get this fixed? I have a work around but don't want to keep this in place and want to be able to setup the servers to maximize performance as well, once upgraded to a Windows 2000 domain.

9 replies

by dc1

DO the routers between subnets allow WINS/DNS traffic to pass back and forth. Sounds more like a lack of the necessary protocols passing through your routers than anything else.

by craig it mangaer

I'm using TCP/IP. WINS is working fine. I can ping the server and it logs on fine just won't provide a good enough connection to allow a password change. Seems like a timeout setting. By adding Netbui since both subnets aren't completely separate I can make a good enough connection to the server to be recognized as a domain member.

by cavedweller

Are you using a routable protocol? Is it bound to the PDC's connection to the new network? Is there a firewall and if so, does it pass the required ports?

by craig it mangaer

See above. Yes there is a firewall and it is working as a router but the two subnets are on the backside of the firewall and two of the BDC's have both subnet addresses on them as well.

by cavedweller

What do you mean by "good enough"? Are you losing so many packets that only something as simple as ping works? If that is the case you need to look at your networking, not the machine settings.

by craig it mangaer

If you can't help, keep your comments to yourself this is not a putdown session. If you know of issues with Win2k timing out fine, if not don't respond. The setup worked fine under win95/98. And if you bothered to read the whole message you would see that password change and machine registration with the PDC is the only thing not working.

by umbral-echo

I've seen this flaky behavior in some of the client machines that I've upgraded and I think it has something to do with the differences in how Windows 2000 Professional resolves names. By default Win2K uses DNS and though you might have WINS set up perfectly, the client is trying to contact a DNS server to find the PDC or PDC Emulator.

It IS supposed to use WINS normally and SHOULD work properly if WINS works, but I couldn't ignore the problem. Here's how I fixed it.

The quickest way to make this go away is probably to proceed with upgrading your PDC to Windows 2000. During the process you will receive an error that no DNS server could be contacted that support Dynamic Updates. Hit Ok and it will ask you if you want to install one. Choosing "Yes" will set up DNS properly and if you point all your clients to that server it should work properly. Remember the following:

Plan your DNS namespace carefully. Active Directory requires that you have a . name at the least, though the original NetBIOS name of the domain remains the same.

On the TCP/IP Properties "DNS" tab on the PDC be sure to fill in that DNS domain name that you intend to upgrade your NT 4 domain to. If you forget to do this it causes serious problems during the upgrade because the name can't be changed. DNS improperly registers records and nothing will work after that.

If WINS or DHCP are installed on the PDC, disable them in the Services applet in control panel before the upgrade. Otherwise the Jet databases wont upgrade properly.

Hope this helps. As soon as DNS is on the network it cleared up the problem.

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