Hello,
I one of our remote locations lost it's local domain controller. PCs can still authenticate to other surviving / geographically disperse domain controllers. However, when PC's authenticate to a few DC's internal DNS does not work. (i.e. if I try to ping a file server FS01 it does not resolve from the PC).
- We have 40 different geographic locations, each location has it's own local domain controller (FULL DC) not read-only.
- We have each location defined as it's own site in AD Sites and Services, and it has it's own subnet associated with it.
- In Inter-site Transports, each site is defined with a cost of 100. Sites in the site link include itself and our Headquarters.
I can't figure out the following
1. Why when a local domain controller goes down, authentication randomly goes to a domain controller? I want to control this so when a domain controller goes down, the fail back is always and ONLY a specific site, our headquarters.
2. Why when a local domain controller goes down, depending on what DC they are authenticating against DNS works or doesn't work. (i.e. we found when PC's authenticated against DCOP.domain.local and DCMUR.domain.local DNS didn't work, however when it authenticated against DCHQ.domain.local DNS worked fine) When I checked DNS entries on DCOP and DCMUR they were present.