Reboot 1st DC, everything hangs

[Rich Madura]

We have an upgraded network. It was NT4 and we upgraded it to 2003 very
smoothly. There were two domain controllers (PDC and BDC) before and there
are stil two domain controllers.

None of the FSMO roles have been moved from the first 2003 DC in this single
domain. We have ~100 accounts. The first DC has DNS, DHCP and WINS, and the
second has replicated DNS and WINS. Only the first DC has the GC.

We then added Exchange 2003 to two other servers, which went smoothly.

We had to reboot the first DC. When it was rebooting, everyone noticed
because they could not reach the Exchange 2003 server along with DNS
resolution hangs, etc.

Sounds like lack of a distributed GC can cause this, am I right? Time to
replicate the GC to the second DC?

Thanks!

 

[J.H]

That's right
Make the second one to be GC, things should be fine!!

J.H

 

[Christopher Collins]

all of the Microsoft Outlook clients will look to the
Global Catalog everytime they try to do some stuff. if
you are rebooting the only GC that you have then you have
a problem. also if you only have DNS installed on your
first DC you will get the DNS "HANG". if you only have 2
DC's in your domain you will have issues because in a
windows 2000 network you need to have the FSMO role of
infrastructure master on a different server. Windows
server 2003 is not limited by this issue so if you can
upgrade your 2000 ad structure to 2003 and then go to
2003 functional level, you will have much better luck.

Chris Collins