MonitorWare Knowledge Base

Hello everyone,
I am in need of a bit of help... Here is the situation.
I bought a new server for my personal network and wanted to get rid of the old one. In the process of transferring all the roles to the new system I toasted my network. Now this was pretty frustrating but I took it as an opportunity to change my network's name and to restructure AD. I removed all roles from the new system and restarted. I then installed all the roles I wanted including AD and DNS of course. This all went very smoothly and everything checked out. I then spent the better half of the day working on AD and transferring the settings from the old to the new user accounts in my workstation pcs. I woke this morning to a problem however. In my event viewer under system I get three errors just like this:
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Dynamic registration or deletion of one or more DNS records associated with DNS domain 'ForestDnsZones.cdi.cdi.' failed. These records are used by other computers to locate this server as a domain controller (if the specified domain is an Active Directory domain) or as an LDAP server (if the specified domain is an application partition).

Possible causes of failure include:
- TCP/IP properties of the network connections of this computer contain wrong IP address(es) of the preferred and alternate DNS servers
- Specified preferred and alternate DNS servers are not running
- DNS server(s) primary for the records to be registered is not running
- Preferred or alternate DNS servers are configured with wrong root hints
- Parent DNS zone contains incorrect delegation to the child zone authoritative for the DNS records that failed registration

USER ACTION
Fix possible misconfiguration(s) specified above and initiate registration or deletion of the DNS records by running 'nltest.exe /dsregdns' from the command prompt or by restarting Net Logon service. Nltest.exe is available in the Microsoft Windows Server Resource Kit CD.
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They vary only by the domain being reported. The three are: 'ForestDnsZones.cdi.cdi.', 'DomainDnsZones.cdi.cdi.' and 'cdi.cdi.'. Now the fact that domain cdi.cdi is having a problem is not surprising as this was my OLD domain on the OLD DC which is now back on the network acting as a file server but with all the other roles removed (No AD or DNS). My new domain has a different name all together. I see no cdi.cdi records at all in the dns and have no idea why this system still looks for it even though everything else works fine. PLEASE tell me I do not have to reinstall and therefor re-do AD. If anyone has ANY suggestions I would me most appreciative.

Hi,

usually you do not need to create a new domain when you upgrade to a newer Server. Usually you just set up a new Domain Controller in your existing domain, move the five FSMO Roles and run dcpromo.exe on the old Server in order to uninstall ActiveDirectory.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324801 for how to move the FSMO Roles.

However in your case, there might be some wrong TCP(IP configration left. Check in the advanced TCP/IP configuration if the dns suffix is correct.

best regards,
Andre Lorbach

Normally... but I did not promote my new server's dns role properly and it screwed up my AD so I decided to take the opportunity to change my domain name since I hated it. I did figure out the problem though. I guess dcpromo did not remove all entries from netlogon.dnb & netlogon.dns. All of the entries for the old domain name plus the new were in there. I just stopped the netlogon service, renamed those files, and restarted it. System recreated the files and it runs like a charm!