Heres the deal, We bought EBS 2008 due to the licensing limitiations on our current SBS 2003 system. After nearly 4 months of issues with the installation and talking to microsoft about it, a decision was made that it wasnt going to happen, a brand new Domain was created "DomainB", the EBS servers were configured with IP addresses that are on our current sub net but were connected to a phycially separate network.
Trying to work out how to transfer all our data to the new domain, i deceided to test something out, Disabling the DHCP server on the EBS management server i connected all the ebs servers to the SBS 2003 network, so on the subnet 10.0.15.0/24 i had DomainA(SBS) and DomainB(EBS). After fiddling about with the security server i managed to get the SBS domain to funtion properly and EBS to function with no errors showing on the EBS console.
To reduce my work load on the upgrade to the new Domain i created a namespace in EBS and then cross mapped the permissions from their original location on the SBS domain, this worked and i am now able to manually browse or manually map a network drive to this name space, however one issue is that sometimes to browse to \\DomainA\Namespace does not work but sometimes it does, i can however always browse to \\MGTserv\Namespace successfully.
Need less to say i wanted a GPO to do these mappings for me, so this was setup. I tested extensively with these gpo's and found that Group policy always applied successfully on all the EBS servers via RSOP and actually logging on to see the results, but never on any client machines.
First stop RSOP.msc on client machines first an error message saying "There are other Resultant Set of Policy applications running already with the information you requested, If you proceed, without exiting these ...." i check no other RSOP is running and there isnt, click ok, Error message " RSop data is invalid. Likely casues are, data is corrupt, data has been deleted or data has never been created, details: invalid namespace. I have restarted to he WMI service and checked rpc is running to no avail.
I then decided to run the same procedure from the management server under group policy management i ran the Group policy results wizard (please note i have run this for all the EBS servers and shows everything is applying correctly), I selected my client machine(which is connected to the EBS domain) and got an error RPC server is unavlaible, i checked the firewall settings and TMG and this should be ok. HOwever to make sure i disabled the WIndows Firewall/Internet connection sharing service and tried again. This time i got a result, with errors, under component status i got the following error "Group Policy Infrastructure failed due to the error listed below.
The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.
Note: Due to the GP Core failure, none of the other Group Policy components processed their policy. Consequently, status information for the other components is not available.
Additional information may have been logged. Review the Policy Events tab in the console or the application event log for events between 25/09/2009 10:30:59 and 25/09/2009 10:31:26."
So i chjecked the policy events, 3 different events, 1 warning and 2 errors.
Warning
Event ID 1517
Source Userenv
Windows saved user TKGALLAGHER\Dturner registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.
Why the above tkgallagher\dturner is the SBS domain account, therefore i wonder why it is in the logs of the EBS domain
Error 1
Event ID 1053
Source Userenv
Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. (The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted. ). Group Policy processing aborted.
Error 2
Event ID 1054
Source Userenv
Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted. ). Group Policy processing aborted.
Any light you could shine on this i would be very grateful.
by: martin_babarikPosted on 2009-09-27 at 03:43:25ID: 25433502
Hello,
your problem seems to be very complex, but actually there might be quite simple cause. My guess goes to incorrect DNS configuration or function.
From my experience these problems are difficult to troubleshoot because the root of the problem might be in many different components. But I will try to give you some suggestions at least:
1. I don't think it was the best idea to run both domains on the same network. Of course it can work normally under ideal circumstances...but I'm not sure if they are ideal.
2. Try to perform thorough DNS diagnostics on all DCs and also from clients in both domains. Make sure clients can successfully resolve DNS names from their domain. Use tools like DCDIAG, DNSLint and REPADMIN.
3. This step is not very popular for many admins, but believe me it's one of the most straight ways to find the cause of the problem - install Wireshark on some of the failing clients, let Wireshark capture the network traffic and while it captures, try to run gpupdate command (or/and try to map a network drive).
If you are able to read the capture data and understand what's happening, I'm 95% sure you will find what's wrong. If you are not familiar with reading the network traffic, you can attach the capture file here and I will try to help you.
Martin