A
Albert M Gostick
Hi,
I have a client who has 3 DC's where 2 are onsite and one is offsite (on a fast link). Onsite are DC1 which has the fsmo roles and DC2 which is supposed to be their backup controller.
They had a problem with their DC2 where windows updates were not working and so they asked me to look at it. I did eventually get that going but during the process I needed to reboot the server and they said "you can't do that...if you do that, then anyone with files open on our main server has all kinds of problems" (their "main" server is not a DC - it is a file and print server).
I said, well that shouldn't happen [or at least that is what I thought] because DC1 will always be available even if DC2 is rebooting. They said that it is a problem and it happens on a database app that has open files (a "file type" database) - but again, these files are on the "MAIN" server, not DC1 or DC2 so at best I would expect that the only DC lookups would be security rights on the file folders that the database app uses).
Questions:
- should it not be possible that either of the DC's can be down temporarily - that is the point of redundancy right?
- I noticed on one of their users that if I display variable info, LOGONSERVER is always \\DC2. does the logon server determine where lookups always go after a user logs in (security lookups, DNS lookups etc)
- IOW, doesn't Windows just do a broadcast for a DC after logging in such that it should just take whichever DC responds first?
- are there specific log entries I should look for if I did an after hours reboot to try to track down what is causing this dependency to DC2?
That's enough questions for now...thanks!
Continue reading...
I have a client who has 3 DC's where 2 are onsite and one is offsite (on a fast link). Onsite are DC1 which has the fsmo roles and DC2 which is supposed to be their backup controller.
They had a problem with their DC2 where windows updates were not working and so they asked me to look at it. I did eventually get that going but during the process I needed to reboot the server and they said "you can't do that...if you do that, then anyone with files open on our main server has all kinds of problems" (their "main" server is not a DC - it is a file and print server).
I said, well that shouldn't happen [or at least that is what I thought] because DC1 will always be available even if DC2 is rebooting. They said that it is a problem and it happens on a database app that has open files (a "file type" database) - but again, these files are on the "MAIN" server, not DC1 or DC2 so at best I would expect that the only DC lookups would be security rights on the file folders that the database app uses).
Questions:
- should it not be possible that either of the DC's can be down temporarily - that is the point of redundancy right?
- I noticed on one of their users that if I display variable info, LOGONSERVER is always \\DC2. does the logon server determine where lookups always go after a user logs in (security lookups, DNS lookups etc)
- IOW, doesn't Windows just do a broadcast for a DC after logging in such that it should just take whichever DC responds first?
- are there specific log entries I should look for if I did an after hours reboot to try to track down what is causing this dependency to DC2?
That's enough questions for now...thanks!
Continue reading...