FSMO Roles Confusion

[BiJae]

I've inherited a precarious situation at my new job. I have three servers currently online, tcud-data, tcud-ex1 and my newest data. Data was installed a couple weeks ago to take over the role of tcud-data, hosting all the data files.

Tcud-ex1 is the MS Exchange server for our office, hosting all of our e-mail.

After I installed DATA I promoted it to be a DC. I want it however to be the primary domain controller and the one the users log in to.

My goal is to move the Exchange server from the hardware of TCUD-DATA, re-installing the os and giving it a new name.

I'm from a Novel world so I'm not 100% on Active Directory, however I've been reading a lot about the PDC and FSMO roles. This is where I noticed I have something odd. DATA is reporting that it's the PDC for RID/PDC/Infrastructure when viewed from the domain in Active Directory Users and Computers. When I look at the same information on TCUD-EX1 it shows ERROR in the Operations Master field for all three.

The GUI reports that the Operations Master is Off Line and the roles cannot be transferred. However, I can browse to the server and can exchange files between TCUD-EX1 and Data no problem. After some further reading I decided to try to sieze the roles using the NTDSUTIL.

I launched NTDSUTIL from TCUD-EX1. I navigated to the connections menu and issued the command to connect to server DATA. I received the following response:

Binding to data ...
DsBindW error 0x6d9(There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper.)

I've searched through some of the forums, but I don't see any errors using the bind command. I want to know how I can make DATA the operations Master and get TCUD-EX1 to report the same thing, with out error?

Any assistance, or direction of where to look would be helpful.

Thank you,

http://www.bijae.net

"If the only prayer you said in
your whole life was, 'thank you,'
that would suffice."
-- Meister Eckhart

 

[Roadki11]

See if this is helpful.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839880

RoadKi11

 

[58sniper]

No such thing as a PDC in the 2000/2003 world. All DCs are equal.

From a CMD prompt, run
netdom query fsmo
and see what it says.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[58sniper]

Oh yeah - never put Exchange on a DC.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[BiJae]

Thank you 58sniper!

I ran netdom query fsmo on both the new and the exchange server. Both reported all roles to be hosted by DATA.

Thanks for the tip about not making an Exchange server a DC. I'll add demoting that to the list of things to fix.

I ran the DCDIAG tool and have some interesting (scary?) results. I received several last replication messages from servers that I didn't even know existed.

Testing server: Default-First-Site-Name\Data
    Starting test: Replications
      REPLICATION-RECEIVED LATENCY WARNING
      DATA: current time is 2006-11-10 09:51:22
        CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=tcud,DC=state,DC=TX,DC=us
       Last replication received from TCUD-BDC at 2004-06-16 13:56:58
       WARNING: This latency is over the Tombstone Lifetime of 60 days!

       Last replication received from TCUD-NFPBFS at 2004-05-23 17:58:12
       WARNING: This latency is over the Tombstone Lifetime of 60 days!

Next is a warning of DsGetDcName. "Warning: DsGetDcName returned information for \\tcud-data.tcud.state.tx.us, when we were trying to reach DATA. Server is not responding or is not considered suitable.

TCUD-Data was the server this new one replaced. It is still online and part of the network. I used the migration utility to move the data to the new server.

After that several partition tests are run, each passing. The next test that fails is the FSMO Check.

      Starting test: FsmoCheck
         Warning: DcGetDcName(TIME_SERVER) call failed, error 1355
         A Time Server could not be located.
         The server holding the PDC role is down.
         Warning: DcGetDcName(GOOD_TIME_SERVER_PREFERRED) call failed, error 1355
         A Good Time Server could not be located.
         ......................... tcud.state.tx.us failed test FsmoCheck

What would be a good course of action to remove the antiquated servers from the Active Directory Schema? How do I get the FSMO roles straightened out and operational? How is it they're still reporting the old servers in these tests? Should I back up all my data, nuke the whole forest and build a new one from scratch?

Thank you for your help!

http://www.bijae.net

"If the only prayer you said in
your whole life was, 'thank you,'
that would suffice."
-- Meister Eckhart

 

[58sniper]

You can't demote or promote a box once Exchange is on it. Doing so permanently breaks Exchange.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Microsoft Exchange MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt