MonitorWare Knowledge Base

Here is the situation. I have 5 servers located at different locations and all of them are domain controllers. 4 of them are server 2003 and one is 2000. For some reason when the 2000 server goes offline no one can login. I know since all of the machines are DC's that this shouldn't happen but it does. Anyone have any insight on why this is?

Hello there,

You need to check were you have placed your FISMO roles. One of your FISMO roles is the PDC emulator which is required for Domain logons. If this machine goes offline then none of your users will be able to logon to the domain.

Other things include DNS failure, how many of your DC's are DNS enabled? if your Windows 2000 box is your DNS server and none of the other servers are DNS enabled then sure enough when that box goes down you will loose the login.

Also think about your global catalog server, this is required during login and failure of this will prevent you loging in.

Hope that helps:)

I've already made sure that other servers hold the FSMO roles. If I remember correctly the guy who set these servers up made everyone of the the servers a DNS server. All the computers point to a box that runs 2003. I still need to look into the global catalog. After reading more and more I kind of think my DNS is messed up.