Clients locking up when PDC not available

[MarkPS]

We have a PDC located in our corporate office and a trusted BDC at another site. We lost power at our corp office rendering the PDC unavailable. At the site PC's trying to logon to the domain locked up during logon. According to the logs the netlogon replication between the controllers was happening like clock-work about every 15 minutes until the power failure. What we originally thought was that these clients were trying to go to the corp PDC and not their site BDC to authenticate. After digging deeper I found the site NT server is old and has many services including Exchange, DNS and InnoculateIT running on it. Is it possible for a BDC to not kick in when the PDC is unavailable? My second question: is there any way to specify which box clients will try authenticating to? I assumed they would go to the closest box available. I'm still thinking the box got overwhelmed given it's lack of resources

 

[MasterRacker]

Clients authenticate with the "nearest" box. What this really means is that the authentication request is broadcast and whichever DC repplis first if the authentication agent. You can't lock to a specific box.

Jeff
masterracker@hotmail.com

If everything seems to be going well: you don't have enough information.......

 

[baby]

You could check to see which server they are authenticated on by going to the dos prompt and type "echo %logonserver%"

This will tell you which server. You'd know if the problem is slow BDC at the site or authentication over slow wan.

Said
ssayyar@uk.now.com