PDC/BDC Authentication?

[Pancho]

I was always under the impression that the closest DC in a domain would be the authenticator. But I recently had a BDC get "stuck on Stupid" and half my users werent able to login. Wouldnt the machines try to authenticate with the next possible DC? Took a while till I got to the BDC and rebooted it and things got worked out. Is there something I'm missing. The whole reason for having a BDC in a small company would be for authentication should the PDC goes down right????

 

[majestrate]

Microsoft says that a BDC will authenticate if the PDC is to busy or is down, however I have the "The domain controller for this domain could not be found..." error message quite a few times. Since I had logged on before, I got cached information, no problems. I'll see if I can locate the key again, but it is possible to specify which DC you want a client to connect to (I have played with this, and at times it too doesn't work right).

On another note, each DC can only support a limited number of connections, so if your BDC wasn't closing connections after the user authenticated then the open connections would just keep building up and building up until you had no more available, but once you reboot, the connections are obviously closed/reset.

 

[vreiner]

Please note, if you set a particular DC in the registry as Majestrate suggests, then that system will ONLY authenticate to that specified DC. Just a warning.... I've been doing a lot of reading about authentication and I remember that caveat.

 

[majestrate]

everything i read from microsoft said that it will first try to contact that dc, if it couldn't then it would netbios broadcast to get another dc.