NT 4.0 Servers not appear grayed out in Server Manager

[dwallace]

I have two BDC servers on my WAN that appear "grayed out" in the Server Manager applet. From my end, I can ping the servers, I can Find Computer... using their IP Address but can't Find Computer... using their server name and they do not appear in the Network Neighoborhood browse list. From the remote server end, they can browse the entire network with no problems and successfully sync up with the PDC on command. I have checked and double checked WINS and DNS to make sure they are correctly configured. Any thoughts?

 

[kalpeshh]

Hi,
It looks like you have browsing problem. Run latest service pack, it might solve the problem. We had same problem with some of the workstation here, running Service pack it solved our problem. Try it.

--Admin

 

[dwallace]

All servers already have latest SP 6a installed.

After I posted this message, I noticed that my LMHOSTS file did not have the two servers in question added to it (my other servers that I have no problems with, were already included in this file.) I will reboot the server tonight and see what happens.

 

[kalpeshh]

Ok,
That might be the problem. But running service pack again do not harm the server. Sometime when you add new hardware or services we forget to run service pack and that might be the case too.

 

[jdeane]

This can also occur if your greyed out servers have missed a weekly hardware password change which the PDC sends out.

You could try to sync the entire domain, however when I had this problem it did not work and I had to actually highlight each grayed out server in turn and sync it with the domain controller for it all to work correctly.

Check your event viewers to see if this is your problem.

Jonathan

 

[rjbj]

I don't know if installing the latest service pack will solve your problem completely, but it seems to me that your Secure Channel has failed on the BDC's. Go to

http://support.microsoft.com

use Windows NT Server as the product and in the query section type this article: Q150518. This article has links to other good articles so you might have to do a little digging. I have used the Secure Channel command line on BDC's many times and let me tell you it is the only solution I've ever gottem from Microsoft that gave me the exact result that they said it would.