Domain Controller Disaster Recovery

[henrik1980]

Hi all,

I have inherited an office network that is split between two locations that are linked by a VPN. Both are on the same domain.

In each office there is a Windows 2003 Server, both are domain controllers. Both also act as the file server for each location and have File Replication Services running over the VPN to keep each others files up to date.

As there wasn't a backup solution in place I immediately implemented one to backup the file server.

However both servers are of relatively low spec (1 HD per server) and there is currently not the budget to upgrade them.

Both DC's are DNS servers (I also set up an additional DNS that one of the DC's zone transfers to) and both are Global Catalog servers.

So my question is this. Is there anything else I should be doing to be able to handle failure of one of the Domain Controllers?

If one DC goes down on one LAN then I'm aware the other should be able to accomodate for it but I'm unsure this is the case. A recent restart of the DC on the main LAN prevented users from logging in until it was back online.

Thanks for reading!

 

[kmkeshav]

It seems the workstations are not able to locate the DNS server. What was the error the users received when they tried to logon when the DC in your main office was restarted?

-Keshav

 

[henrik1980]

Hi Kmkeshav,

Unfortunately I don't have a note of the error as I didn't get to see it myself.

All client PC's do have both DC's as their primary and secondary DNS servers.

I just noticed that the server that was restarted is entered on each client PC's config as being the WINS server, however this server doesn't actually have WINS setup. There is no WINS server on the domain.

 

[PaulGillespie]

In terms of disaster recovery, if they are only single hard disks i would use norton ghost to create images of the servers once a month.