About a month ago we lost our Primary Domain Controller which was a windows 2000 Server. We were way over due to upgrade to Windows 2003 so I decided I would take this opportunity to upgrade the server. So I fixed the server reformatted the harddrive installed 2003 from scratch. I reinstalled all apps and rebuilt the Domain. Same domain name. Recreated all user accounts and priveleges. I went to each workstation in our network and rejoined them to the domain. Even though the domain name was the same I understand that the workstations don’t recognize it because the domain SID would be different. Afterwards everything seemed to function just grand. All our users can log on. I re-did all their maps to the server one workstation at a time. We have about 12 workstations. Most are Windows XP Pro SP3 with a few SP2. All workstationsa re experiences a problem where randomly through out the day they loose the ability to connect to the PDC as well as a second Windows 2003 server that we have. We have only the one DC in our infrastructure. Our firewall is doing our DHCP. I can set each PC to lock if the user is inactive for 10 minutes and to require a login if it locks and this brings the network back if it is lost. There are no entries in the server event log when the connection is lost. When I goto my computer the computer seems to think that the connection is there. But when I attempt to connect to the share it sits there for 2 minutes and then says that it can’t connect with various different behaviors. Sometimes there is a message “The user name you typed is the same as the user name you logged in with. That user name has already been tried. A domain controller cannnot be found to verify that user name”. Sometimes it comes up continuesly asking for a userid/password and won’t accept anything we put in.
I’ve been scowering blogs for a month and tried fiddling with the DNS, fiddled with the net config server /autodisconnect. I’ve set the power settings to not allow the pc to shut of the NIC if it is inactive for the workstations. If checked the user session options and they are set to never disconect. Nothing seems to be working.