New Firewall Wont Let PDC stay as PDC.

[kjonnnnn]

We just installed a firewall (Cisco) last week. Now our PDC is busted down to BDC, the BDC was busted down to just plain workstation. How do I know.

We booted up with the Firewall turned off. Everything is normal. As soon as the Firewall was turned on, the PDC went to be a BDC (as per Servere Manager), and the BDC will only show up as a regular Workstation.

Anyone ever seen this before?

 

[ilpadrino]

We had a network analyst that worked for us briefly who installed a cisco router and gave it the same name as our domain. So our PDC exhibited the same symptoms you're describing. It appeared as a BDC instead, and workstations were unable to logon to the domain.

As soon as we renamed that router, everything was back to normal. The analyst was an arrogant type and argued with me for hours about this. Routers are completely tcpip, except for one thing... its identification, which is netbios. That's what interfered with my server.

Hope this helps.. good luck.

Joe
NT Admin

 

[wybnormal]

While I dont know about every router, I can say that Cisco routers do not speak Netbios natively. Routers by design are layer 3 devices ( ip and mac) and NB is layer 2. The only way you can get it to speak NB in a way, is to use a command called "IP Helper" which just means that the router will forward 10 normally non-routable broadcast packet types of which NB ports 137 and 138 are part of the group. The other way is to use DLSW which "tunnels" NB across WAN links by a TCP connection. I guess a third way would to be to set up bridging but that defeats the whole point of the router.

The name of the router have zero bearing on the network unless you enable domain name services where the router can be hit by name rather then IP.

If you are talking a firewall like a PIX, there are differences between a PIX and a "normal" router but still the rules of broacasts apply. I dont claim to be a PIX expert by any stretch.. pretty unique beasties.

I would guess that the PDC used IP as did the router. That *could* lead to a conflict if there are two IPs with the same name. Somebody would be seriously confused by the end of the day

MikeS
"Diplomacy; the art of saying 'nice doggie' till you can find a rock" Wynn Catlin