I am unable to authenticate with my domain\administrator (SID 500) account either as a service or at a login prompt.
I get this generic error:
"The System could not log you on. Make sure your User name and domain are correct, then type your password again..."
As far as I can tell, all of my other accounts (including one I made last night to circumvent a problem this was causing) are logging in fine.
All of my DC and AD checks seem to come back fine.
Recent history:
I've recently assumed responsibility for this network, and began suspecting that there may be DNS, Time Sync, and Domain issues.
Of the two DCs on the network, I found one of them had Tombstoned but I think was still being referenced by different servers (it would display when checking time, etc).
On Friday last week I promoted another 2003 server to DC (which gave me 2 working ones and a Tombstoned one). On Monday I demoted the Tombstoned DC. I tried to DCPromo it down, but it failed. I then tried to repair as much of it as I could before I forced the demotion. I then did a metadata cleanup.
The AD and DC checks are coming back looking well, and there doesn't seem to be anything suspicious in the event logs at this time. Yay!
Before demoting the Tombstoned DC I began getting intermittent issues with my Backup Exec client. As I would later learn, BackUp Exec was using the Domain\Administrator account for its Service Signon. I don't know how exactly, but after Net Time and/or DNS updates it would always fix itself for a short while. It was my suspicion that the Tombstoned DC was the cause of the problem, so I waited to see if getting rid of it would fix this issue.
My point with the BackupExec comment is that the timing of events makes me wonder what exactly was authenticating the Admin account...
Anyway, in order to get backups I created a new account for Backup Exec to use, and it is now happy.
But, the Domain/Administrator account is tied to lots of services throughout the network, so I am hoping that I can find a way to get it working again. The fact that it's SID500 makes me a little nervous about loosing it too.
Sorry for the length of this post, but I really appreciate any help that can be provided.
Jonathan