WAN outage caused us AD issues

[Russ]

We had a WAN outage at one of our sites for a few hours. Users who
didn't logout or reboot their PC appeared to be OK for a few hours.
After a few hours, users could no longer access their network drives
to both the local file servers, and file servers back at HQ. If you
rebooted, it took forever to get to the ctrl-alt-del logon screen.
After awhile, all you had access to was your C: drive. No network
priners, no network drives, etc. It was saying server not available.

The Domain controller at this site is a global catalog server. So, I
think this shouldnt have happened. Any idea what might have gone
wrong?

 

[Andrew Mitchell]

(e-mail address removed) (Russ) said

We had a WAN outage at one of our sites for a few hours. Users who
didn't logout or reboot their PC appeared to be OK for a few hours.
After a few hours, users could no longer access their network drives
to both the local file servers, and file servers back at HQ. If you
rebooted, it took forever to get to the ctrl-alt-del logon screen.
After awhile, all you had access to was your C: drive. No network
priners, no network drives, etc. It was saying server not available.

The Domain controller at this site is a global catalog server. So, I
think this shouldnt have happened. Any idea what might have gone
wrong?

Where is your DNS located? If the clients can't talk to a DNS you will have
this sort of trouble.

 

[barabba]

Do these clients access multiple DCs or only the one within their own
site ?
Have you checked that this DC is up and running ? Are there any
clients that can be authenticated successfully by this DC ?
Make sure AD Services are ok.
As an example, telnet port 389 from the clients to the DC to make sure
that the necessary connectivity is ok.

Has the DC suffered a power outage ? This can severly affect DCs (AD
corruption most cases). If network drives are regulated through logon
scripts obviously these do not run.

However you should post more details to obtain proper help.

Bye
Bar

 

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

I would expect the issue is DNS or site implementation in AD which ends up
coming down to DNS as well.

joe

 

[Russ]

The site has a single DC that provides DNS and DHCP.

The DC's network adapter is pointed back to headquarters for primary
and secondary DNS. Is this the issue possibly? Since the WAN link
was down, the DC at the site couldn't do it's own DNS lookups, however
it could provide DNS still to the workstations at the site.

 

[ptwilliams]

You'd be best off pointing the site DC to itself, and then the main HQ (or
the other way round if you like).

If the DNS server can't do lookups it cannot authenticate authentication
requests, verify access tokens, etc.

--

Paul Williams

http://www.msresource.net
http://forums.msresource.net
______________________________________
The site has a single DC that provides DNS and DHCP.

The DC's network adapter is pointed back to headquarters for primary
and secondary DNS. Is this the issue possibly? Since the WAN link
was down, the DC at the site couldn't do it's own DNS lookups, however
it could provide DNS still to the workstations at the site.