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PCs authenticating to remote DC

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by timothy.sharpe

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The workstations in one of my regional offices are bypassing the WIN 2K DC in the office and authenticating via a remote DC instead. Not a huge problem but it slows things down and I would prefer the workstations authenticate via the local DC. This is happening consistently so I think there is something other than load balancing going on. Plus the server is brand new and has plenty of processing power and memory. We have a Windows 2000 AD network running in mixed mode with 1 home office and 5 regional offices. Each regional office has between 25-30 workstations and they are all linked to the home office via a fractional T line. The home office has a WIN 2K DC and we just converted two regional offices to WIN 2K DC. The three other regional offices have NT 4 SP6a. All workstations are WIN 2K. Any ideas what is going on or is there a way to force the workstations to authenticate to the local DC?

5 replies

by sgt_shultz

what is in the event logs on the workstations?
they are consistently finding the remote dc? sounds like dns? somehow the wkst are not finding a dc on local subnet. so going to alternate dns server and finding dc somewhere else?
here is article might shed light:
mskb 247811 How Domain Controllers Are Located in Windows (sic on the bad grammar!)
from support.microsoft.com

by shawn

One thing to look at is using sites in your environment. Use Active Directory Sites and Services to create sites. If you create sites for each of the remote offices (or at least for the one you are having issues with), and associate the local domain controller with that site, then the local PCs will first look to a DC in their own site before attempting to access a DC across the WAN link.

To learn more about using the Active Directory Sites and Services tool, go to:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/planning/activedirectory/adsites.asp

(remove any spces in the URL)

Hope this helps.

by cg it

I'm with ssimpson. Create sites in Active Directory. Each site with it's own zone. The local DC is authoritative for their respective zone. With zone transfers, if the local DC fails, users failing to find a local DC can then look for other DCs not local to authenticate with within the domain.

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