Most of the time these types of login problems are the result of DNS
misconfiguration. Your XP clients find domain controllers by querying DNS.
Make sure that you have DNS installed on at least one of your domain
controllers. Then make sure that all of your domain controllers and clients
are pointing to that DNS server for DNS, not out to your ISP. You can then
configure your DNS server to forward requests out to the ISP on behalf of
your clients. As long as your clients and servers are pointed to a valid
DNS server, they should be registering in DNS properly. Go into the
properties of your foward lookup zone for your domain on the general tab and
make sure that "allow dynamic updates" is set to "yes". If your servers
and/or clients were not pointing to an internal DNS server, you will want to
stop and restart the netlogon service on your domain controllers to make
sure they reregister their records after configuring them correctly.
If DNS is set up correctly and you are still having problems, please provide
event ID errors and messages that they get when they fail to login so I can
provide you with some additional assistance.
I hope this helps.
Ray Lava
Microsoft Corporation
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
mahough said:
I am trying to login to a Windows 2K server from a number of XP machines
and more times than not get the message, "Windows cannot connect to the
domain either because the domain controller is down or otherwise
unavailable..." I have successfully logged in at each of these machines,
but can't do it regularly. If I can't login, I go in locally and am able to
ping the server as well as browse to files and login from there. I am
logging in as administrator each time and have two servers in my tree. Any
help would be appreciated. Thanks
