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Tombstone DC's

Hello Experts,

I need some advice.
I have a testing lab that has 3 2008 Domain Controllers.
I have not been monitoring this domain but 2 of the DC's have stopped replicating and now are past the tombstone time limits. These Domain controllers are up but it looks like some time in December they stopped replicating and now DNS is having a lot of issues and I need to remove them.

I cannot log into them because their DNS will not work to validate my credentials, I have tried to reset the local admin password, that won't work either. Both of these Domain controllers did not hold any of the FSMO roles. I want to demote them but since they are still live it's giving me issues. Should I just power them off and force removal from the one still living? I'm not sure how to do it since they are still detected on the network.....

Any advice is appreciated. I did try to force replication by a change in the registry and changing the tombstone date but that didn't work.

thank you,

Karen

CITG_Carl

Good afternoon,

if you turn the domain controllers off, you will have to manually clear out the schema using ADSIEDIT.msc and in DNS. The process takes around an hour, but you need to be really careful.

Have you reset your admin password since Decemeber? If so try logging into these domain controllers using the older password.

If you can log into the DC's dcpromo them out, and then back in if required

Cheers

klsphotos

ASKER

I haven't changed my password, it's not doing any authentication properly because DNS is not working right due to the replication. They won't let me in with the same password I always had. I can get into the one with the FSMO roles still working but not the other two.

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CITG_Carl

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klsphotos

ASKER

Yes, the DNS is not working on these two Domain Controllers. I can see the DNS, it's running from the one that is but it has not synched since December. It's on looks like it's running but it's not so AD isn't working to authenticate me to get into them. If I do a repadmin /showrepl all comes back successful, but it's not....

userPrincipalName

Dont bother trying to resurrect a tombstoned DC.

Your best course of action is to remove it from the domain manually using ntdsutil. It will take you about 10 minutes (less if you are comfortable with the process) and is well documented.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736378%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

klsphotos

ASKER

I removed the failed domain controllers from Sites and Services, DNS, DHCP scope and did a meta data clean up and removed from the Schema.

Did I miss anything? From all of these links it looks like I got it and the meta data clean up is only showing the one server, the one I am on which is what I want.