Active Directory down, Server unavailable

gt74 · 31 Oct 2010 at 17:30

Guys

I have taken over an sbs 2008 box that was migrated from an sbs2003 about 2 weeks ago. The box is reasonable beefy for sbs 16gb ram etc so there's no issues there.

I installed exchange service pack 2 this afternoon and that seemed to go in no problem. Finished ok, all green lights on the wrapper.

Did a reboot and about 3 minutes after logging in, AD completely died. If I reboot same thing, AD is up and fine for about 3 mins and then dies.

If I try to access exchange I get 0x8007203A. The server is not operational.

DHCP and DNS are not accessible either.

All other data is ok but obviously, nobody will be able to log in.

I have disabled the AV software to no effect.

All help gratefully received.

gt74 · 31 Oct 2010 at 17:59

Very strange one. The wrapper reset my static ip address to .3 from .30

DNS of course is all pointing at .30

Just rebooting now, will see what happens

gt74 · 31 Oct 2010 at 20:04

This get more of a pain in the ars* but i have narrowed it down.

The ip address change that I thought was done by the sp2 wrapper was in fact done by the 'fix my network wizard' - I hate these wizards, you can't see what's going on.

The issue is dns - something is killing the pointer to the gc record a couple of minutes after the server is booted and everything falls apart after that.

Active Directory Domain Services was unable to establish a connection with the global catalogue.

Additional Data
Error Value
8430 The directory service encountered an internal failure
InternalID 3200ce6

gt74 · 31 Oct 2010 at 20:20

Definitive issue:

Start the server and everything comes up ok. I can ping the nic locally and from a remote machine.

AD and all of the services are in use and respond normally.

After about two minutes the server nic stops responding to a ping (it will still respond to 127.0.0.1).

Guess:

Because everything in dns is bound to 192.168.10.30, when the nic loses that binding everything else fails as well.

Firewall and AV are turned off, nic is set to register in dns - I'm at a bit of a loss.

gt74 · 30 Nov 2010 at 20:05

Sorry guys, I should have followed this up at the time - for what it's worth...

The problem was the routing and remote access service and an IPv6 static filter.

The service was on a delayed start hence the delay to the problem. I didn't realise to what extent SBS2008 relied on IPv6 and in particular the server being able to resolve to itself. The resolution was to uncheck the static filter setting in the RRAS mmc.

Thanks to all who offered some help.