Domain Not Available after Summer Off

I work at a small school and we have servers in a few of the teachers labs. One teacher is having trouble with new students not being able to log in to their new accounts. When they try to log in, they are asked to change their password from the default. When they make the change and try to continue to log in, they receive the message that the password could not be changed because the domain controller is not available. This is Windows2003 Server with XP Professional clients. Old accounts can still log in. Can someone give me an idea of what is going on, and how to fix it? Thanks, Dennis Myhand

 

It is probably worth starting with the basics. Computers will cache user credentials while they cannot connect to the server, so your computers will appear to log on even when the server is not present .... unless something needs to change - like the password needs to change.

Therefore your problem could be a symptom of lack of connection to the server.

So first thing to check is basic connectivity. Can the problem PCs ping the server by IP address, server name, and server full DNS name?

For example, for a server called "frank" on domain "school.local" and with an IP address of 10.0.0.1 the commands used to test the connection would be:

Code:

ping 10.0.0.1
ping frank
ping frank.school.local

And, even if you think basic connectivity isn't the problem, try all the pings as the next thing to check is name resolution.

 

Okay, I tried the pings, IP address works, server name and server full dns name get no response. After I left yesterday someone else tried to join a machine to this network and received the message "The network path was not found." I know this because it was still on the machine this morning which I checked by that room. Does this change anything? Thanks, Dennis

 

The key to name resolution on a Windows 2003 network is that DNS is set to the IP address of the server. If this isn't set up you get all sorts of problems including authentication problems.

Have a look at this thread in the Network forum:

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=66832

It includes information on DHCP scope options and setting up DNS forwarders.

 

Actually, posting this information is so common that I've composed a sticky with more information on using 2003 as the primary DNS:

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=67193

 

Cool! Thanks.