DC goes down peer knows nowt

Hi all

I am currently self studing to for systems admin and wroking an internship and am charged with finding a disaster plan for my company.

To test I have set up a another 2003 server using vpc and joined it to the existing domain as a peer dc. All of the active directory objects have successully replicated over which is great so I rest assured I have another dc that can contain the system state if the main one goes down.

However when I fire up the vpc server 2003 on its own separated from the network it cannot acces any of the data and the aduc is empty/does not load.

I thought the purpose of a peer dc was that if one went down the other took over! Anyone know what Im missing?

Thanks for reading

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Comments

rsutton

I assume you are replicating DNS also. Is the peer DC pointing to itself for DNS?

Devilsbane

celtic_tiger wrote: »

I thought the purpose of a peer dc was that if one went down the other took over! Anyone know what Im missing?

Yes and no. With Server 2003 that was the idea, that multiple servers could share the work and provide redundancy. But there are some things that can't just be switched back and forth willy nilly and require manual intervention. I am referring to the 5 FSMO roles.

That doesn't sound what your problem is, but maybe. I'd agree with Celtic about the DNS. Make sure that your VM DC is hosting the zone and that it is pointed to itself for DNS.

Check out Understanding FSMO Roles in Active Directory for more information about FSMO roles. If you have any questions after reading this, ask them and I'll try my best to answer.

How to view and transfer FSMO roles in Windows Server 2003 will go into how to transfer them, but don't be doing this with the corporate network unless your goal is to be internshipless faster than you can say oops.