RE: Authentication problem on DC failure

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You are correct multiple dc's are intended to provide that sort of
redundancy. Do your clients use dhcp for their ip addresses? If so under
options in the dhcp scope have you configured both dc's as dns servers for
clients to use? Clients can only authenticate to dc's if they can find them
and they locate them by looking at srv records in dns. If clients were
configured to only use the dns server that you rebooted then they wouldn't be
able to locate the other dc and therefore couldn't authenticate.
Hope that helps
James.
--
James Yeomans, BSc, MCSE
Ask me directly at: http://www.justaskjames.co.uk


"Phil" wrote:

Hi,
We have a Windows 2003 domain, with 2 DC's which also both act as DNS
servers. Recently, when I reboted the 'secondary' DC for maintenance there
was a period of about 90 seconds where it looked like name resolution failed
across several platforms on our system. Several mapped drives failed as
errors reported that the server names could not be found. After about 90
seconds everything went back to normal, but we lost data in this period. All
the member servers have their Primary and Secondary DNS settings correctly
configured and I can't see anything obviously wrong in the DNS setup. It is
integrated with the AD.
I was wondering what hapens to a mapped share from an Authentication point
of view if a DC fails - i.e. does a member server use one particular DC to
authenticate with, and what hapens should this DC fail? I was hoping a
failure of a DC should be fairly invisible if you have multiple DC's?
Thanks.
.

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