Problem with 2003 domain

[Jorge Pinto Leite]

Dear all

I hope someone can point me in some direction to solve this issue.

The scenery:
Small network (around 15 clients) all with XP and all SP and updates installed
A single DC, W2K3 with SP2 and all updates installed
The DC is a DHCP and a DNS Server
In DHCP configuration it points to a router on same network
He is the DNS server of all clients (including himself) and queries the router

Everything worked ok until last monday. Starting from that day, the symptons are:
a) The DC cannot go to Internet
b) He cannot resolve its own name by a ping
c) From NSLOOKUP, he points correctly to every single URL
d) All clients are able to surf the Internet (meaning, I presume, that all requests are sent to the DC, that forwards them to the router, and delivers correctly the IP address to the client)
e) Trying to understand what happened, I went into Active Directory. Message: the DC could not be reached (???)
f) Went into DNS mngm. Everything seems fine, but noticed that there were almost no events recorded
g) Went into DHCP. Only a [0.0.0.0] shows up, and a message saying that the DHCP server could not be reached. I configure it, and after leaving DHCP mngm, it happened again.
h) All clients are able to join the domain, but now must have a fixed IP address as they cannot discover one.
i) Under Computer Management, Services and Applications, a DHCP server with IP 119.55.182.230 is present, with a message saying that he could not be reached.
j) When I try to force under DHCP mngm the DC, it shows up for a few moments but with an IP address of 0.0.0.0
k) After an ipconfig/all command, it shows the correct name of DC, but no DNS suffix.

The DC was configured with a domain name of aaa.local

Nothing was installed, neither hw nor sw. Some clients had a virus problem last friday (ree1.exe, ree2.exe and nl.exe) but not the server. Do you think that had something to do with this?

Can you help me?

Thanks in advance

[Igor Karasik]

Did you tried to run dcdiag.exe and see errors ?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=96a35011-fd83-419d-939b-9a772ea2df90&DisplayLang=en
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776854.aspx

And probably stupid question, but anyway - any chance win2003 firewall on DC is ON ?

[Jorge Pinto Leite]

Hi Igor, and thanks for your reply.

DCDIAG can not run, with the message
"LDAP SEARCH FAILED WITH ERROR 58. AN ERROR OCCURED DURING DNS HOST LOOKUP".

And yes, the DC firewall is turned off.

Any other ideas?

[Derek_56]

Jorge,

This is worrisome: "He cannot resolve its own name by a ping." This needs to be corrected first. Either you have a network issue on the DC, IE: NIC settings changed, were DHCP assigned or something else, or DNS is very broken on that DC. If the DC cannot ID itself in AD, register it's records in an AD integrated DNS, then DHCP will not be able to start if it can't verify it's authorized in the domain. Double check your network settings and look into DNS on that DC.

Derek

[Shoghi Martinez G.]

Go to the DNS and check the A record for this server, verify that this info is the correct.

Veryfy dns setting in the server NIC too.

You can force the name resolution of your server temporaly so you can run the dcdiag utility, edit the system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and hard code the fqdn of ther server, this is TEMPORAL ONLY.

[Jorge Pinto Leite]

Thanks for the answers.

Derek: it seems the NIC settings are correct. So I went to see the DNS settings.

Derek and Shoghi: the DNS shows the A record correct.

Furthermore, a power loss (during all night) happened and obviously the UPS shutdown the DC. Now, the DC boots up but cannot login in the DC. I searched Microsoft and tried to repair, but was unable to login (after entering user & psw I got a "Loading personal settings" and immediatly a "Saving personal settings", then the login screen again). Tried the repair mentioned in Microsoft KB249321 whithout success.

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance

[Jon Finley]

Two things to try:

1. Boot up under Safe Mode (F8 during boot).
- Schedule a full CHKDSK. You can do this by launching a CMD window and running CHKDSK /F, or right-click on your C: drive, select Properties, Tools Tab, check system.
- Reboot and let CHKDSK run.
- When its complete, and the server has rebooted again, attempt to logon.

If this doesn't clear it:

2. Use your install CD's to do a Repair Install.

Jon