question about netlogon

What you have in mind by saying "Lose network connection" ?

To my viewpoint, it is quite understandable. I could only guess that the PDC is more powerful than the BDC. The PDC is apparently set-up to serve application over / across network, while the less important task (serving user logon) is assigned to the BDC.

My second guess is that your network apparently has a huge number of user logging-in and out, therefore overloaded the PDC quite a bit, and might slow down any database operation performed on the PDC.

I would consider very carefully before resetting any configuration before doing a bit research on the main function of the PDC.

After all, with current configuration it works well, right ?

vh_s

I guess most of users' connection are mapped to BDC, so shutdown BDC you see the impact. Check all mapped and shared drives if it's cause.

Normally with NT4 when a user loggs on his authentication is varified by the first PDC or BDC to answer to his request. This is usually a random acton and a user will not know which server authenticated them at logon. I have heard that you can tweakthe registry to set logons to a particular server though. The only other thing that I can think of is that if users have mapped drives on a particular server then obviously they wont be available if that server is shut down but I would have thought that as long as either a BDC or PDC is up and running on the network you will be able to logon.
Another thing, where are your servers located ? are they across one side of a WAN and the users on the other ? If this is the case then you may encounter problems if the local server goes down and they are trying to authenticate across the WAN over a slower connection to another server.

Dear Colleague:

When you say PDC and BDC, is that your designation or is that confirmed by the server manager? There are occasion where you need to shut down the PDC or "Windows NT Primary" (as reported by the Server Manager) so you promote one of the BDC or "Windows NT Secondary" (again as per Server Manager) to take over and become the PDC. Just because your network documentation say that machine 1 is the PDC doesn't mean that it's functioning as PDC at the time. Only way to be sure is to look at the Server Manager.

Also when BDC's boot up and cannot find the PDC, one of the BDC's will take over as the PDC. Hope that answer your questions. :-)

Best wishes,

One possible cause is a name resolution problem. If your BDC is running WINS and/or DNS, and the PDC is not, then shutting down the BDC would cripple your network because your workstations would no longer have a server to use for name resolution. Check this out as a possibility. Hope this helps!

This question was closed by the author