Forest root down , all work station can't logon Please help ! : (

[Guest]

Hi All Experts

I am a bit lost with the way we have Setup of our Active Directory
structure. We have 1 forest root lets call it DC_A1 and 4 DC. They are DC_B2,
DC_C3, DC_D4 and DC_E5. Forest root is the Schema master, PDC emulator and
Infrustructure master

If the root forest is down or not available , all work station have problem
logging onto the network. Please correct me if I am wrong. I throught DCB2,
DC_C3, DC_D4 and DC_E5 would Authenticate the login process if the forest
root is down ?

Any help would be much apprciated.

Thank you

Mr555

 

[Guest]

Sorry forgot to mention. All DC are Global Catalogue Server.

Thank you

 

[Guest]

You should still be able to log on to the child domain if the root DC’s are
offline. I would not keep the Root Dc’s offline for too long if you can at
all help it. This may lead to other replication issues in the environment
when they come back online.

Just for clarification on FSMO roles:


There are two Forest Wide roles and Three Domain Wide roles.


Forest:

Schema Master
Domain Naming Master

Domain:

Rid master
Infrastructure Master
PDC Emulator

Providing you are not making any schema changes or adding any new Domains,
you should still be able to function.
1. Are all domain controllers including the Root DC’s in the same site?
2. Have you promoted a DC to a global catalogue server without rebooting
the server since the root dc has gone down?
3. When you attempt to logon to the client, are you logging into the client
machine with account that has previously logged on before the root dc’s went
offline?
4. You should still be able to logon with cached credentials to the machine
if this is the case. Attempt a logon with the network connection unplugged on
the client machine to validate that you can logon successfully using cached
credentials.
5. Can you view that the client’s secure channel is set to one of the child
domain controllers? You can use the NLTEST command from the command line.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q156684

Regards,

John