Hope you guys can give me some pointers here. The client is a school and
these are the details of the issue:
The main server (â??server1â??, for staff) was derived from earlier NT4 box that
has been upgraded and moved around over the years. It had exchange 5.5 and
was then upgraded first to windows 2000, then exchange 2000. It's hard disk
has been cloned and moved into a newer server. It was once the only server,
18 months ago it was upgraded to server 2003R2, with some difficulty from
exchange 2000 failing. Its been stable for 18 months.
Server2 (for pupils) was added at some point after the first win2k server
came, and was a domain controller and global catalog with server in the
domain â??schoolâ??. All master and schema roles etc were on server1.
At the end of last term I tried to upgrade exchange to 2003. It failed due
to the domain controllers not being in sync. Looking at the system logs there
has been a problem since April 14th. In looking at the AD connector on
exchange 2000 a permissions message was returned. At this point the users
disappeared from server1, but were still ok on server2. Backups were taken
and a third server (server3) introduced, with some success. The exchange data
was moved to server2. Foolishly I then tried to upgrade the exchange here,
and guess what, the users disappeared on server2 and server3!
I then restored the AD from server2 from July 18th back to server2 (server1
had shadow copy in backup exec but no system state backup). I forcibly did a
dcpromo /remove on server1, so itâ??s a standalone as there did not seem much
point in keeping it, I regret it now. The users reappeared on server2, and
with a little more configuration it looks good, you can create new users
(there are around 200) and share folders etc. All the shares are correct. The
exchange data is however â??stuckâ?? here as the AD restore also restores the
registry, so this is another issue!
The main problems are that you cannot login to server2, even though it
claims to be a DC with all roles â?? things like netlogon, sysvol share etc are
all there. You cannot join server1 (or server3) to the domain. You cannot run
a terminal server session on it. You can login on a workstation, but it's so
slow its obviously not right (dns screams at me here?) Nslookup fails on any
other server looking at server2 as dns. If you ping server2â??s fqdn it fails
(but it's ok on server2 itself). Dcdiag and event logs show very little to
help.
Just wondering if anyone can give me some pointers. I have eliminated any
physical possibilities like NIC drivers, switching, cabling etc and am pretty
sure it's DNS (things like this always seem to be DNS!) but I am kind of
banging my head against a brick wall here. In essence, I need to get Server2
to accept logins and allow server1 (or server3) to be a AD server. Then I can
tackle the Exchange issue on server2.
Thanks a lot guys.