Replication Problem with one Site

[Christopher Miller]

Okay bare with me on this one it's going to be a little long.

I have 7 locations each with a windows 2000 server (DC) running
Exchange 2000. Each location is connected to the Corp office by VPN. I
started have an issue with a remote locations DC not replicating with
the rest of the DC's. I would create a new user and mailbox on the
remote server and when when outlook would try and find the user on the
exchange server it would say it couldn't match the name. So I look in
exchange and after an hour the RUS service still hadn't stamped the
correct X400 and SMTP address on the account. When I logged into the
Corp server I couldn't see the new account. Now if I create a new user
on the other locations the email addresses are created and I can see
the accounts.

So I then went into ADSS and tried to force a replication from the
remote site to the Corp server and I got a message stating. "The
following error occured during the attempt to contact the Domain
Controller. The RPC server is unavailable. This Condition maybe caused
by a DNS problem."

I tried looking up the error and didn't find much. I looked in DNS and
it does look like there could be some configuration problems. What
does need to be set right in DNS for AD to replicate correctly?

So my question is how should the sites be setup in ADSS and what would
the proper DNS settings be?

 

[Kwyjibo.]

(e-mail address removed) (Christopher Miller) said

Okay bare with me on this one it's going to be a little long.

I have 7 locations each with a windows 2000 server (DC) running
Exchange 2000. Each location is connected to the Corp office by VPN. I
started have an issue with a remote locations DC not replicating with
the rest of the DC's. I would create a new user and mailbox on the
remote server and when when outlook would try and find the user on the
exchange server it would say it couldn't match the name. So I look in
exchange and after an hour the RUS service still hadn't stamped the
correct X400 and SMTP address on the account. When I logged into the
Corp server I couldn't see the new account. Now if I create a new user
on the other locations the email addresses are created and I can see
the accounts.

So I then went into ADSS and tried to force a replication from the
remote site to the Corp server and I got a message stating. "The
following error occured during the attempt to contact the Domain
Controller. The RPC server is unavailable. This Condition maybe caused
by a DNS problem."

What are you seeing in the event log? There should be errors that will
indicate exactly what the problem is.

I tried looking up the error and didn't find much. I looked in DNS and
it does look like there could be some configuration problems.

What did you find that would indicate problems?

What
does need to be set right in DNS for AD to replicate correctly?

So my question is how should the sites be setup in ADSS and what would
the proper DNS settings be?

You need to make sure that you are running the DNS service somewhere on
your network (which you must already be doing to have AD operating)
Just ensure that all servers and clients have their IP configuration set
to specify the correct DNS server. If you are running DHCP you can
specify the DNS server(s) there and the clients will automatically pick
up the settings if configured to use DHCP.

You can either set the correct DNS servers using the Network Connections
applet, or by using netsh from a command line.