Please Help - Random "Domain not available"

[booeyOH]

Hello,
I work at a youth center and we have a Windows 2000 domain for our computer lab (our whole center runs off a Windows 2003 domain, but the computer lab is separate).

For no reason that I can easily discern, some users and/or computers (they are all acer and dell laptops) cannot get to the domain.

For example, I tried to log in a girl, and it said her password had expired, when she tried to put in the new password, it told her it could not connect to the domain. Then, I put in the administrator user and pass, and it logged into the domain just fine.

Any ideas in helping me troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bryan

 

[North323]

when logging in with admin, are you logging in locally? is there anything between the laptop and the domain? after you log in with admin, can you log out and she can log in? have you tried to reset her password on the DC? have you tried to remove the laptop and then re-add? does she have permissions to log in to the domain?

 

[booeyOH]

> when logging in with admin, are you logging in locally?

I can login locally and on the domain

>is there anything between the laptop and the domain?

Just our local network, which has a lot of things on it, so maybe there is confusion. There are 2 other domains controllers on the network

>after you log in with admin, can you log out and she can log in?

I am not sure, I have not tried that, but will try it next time

>have you tried to reset her password on the DC?

I am not sure, I have not tried that, but will try it next time

>have you tried to remove the laptop and then re-add?

Yes, and this works sometimes, but it would be a big hassle to do this everytime the problem creeps up, I am hoping to find the source.

>does she have permissions to log in to the domain?

yes

 

[itsp1965]

From the sounds of it, it looks like one of your Domain controllers is not a global catalog server or could be one of them is experiencing a connectivity issue, which would account for you as a domain admin being able to log on when she can't
Also from the password reset issue again it sounds like the DC running the PDC emulator role which is responsible for password resets is not responding which again leads me to believe that you are having issues with connectivity to one of your DCs.

 

[booeyOH]

itsp1965,
What sort of connectivity issues could it be? The machine was an old P3 gateway, but I recently converted it into a VM on ESXi 3.5

Thanks,
Bryan