Windows DC Experts...
I have a set of Windows 2008 R2 DCs at branch sites. Each site has one server, a DC. When a site suffers a power outage, UPS outage, anything that takes down the lan and domain controller, both systems start back up...the DC comes online and doesn't get a network link yet, as the switch is still going through post...then the DC throws a bunch of errors in the event log about not being able to contact the domain, unable to start DNS, DFS connection issues, can't get authentication for DHCP, etc...once that settles down, the switch comes online and the server gets a link....where it sits there indefinitely. Even though it's now on the lan, workstations can't get IP addresses, get to mapped dfs paths, etc....it's a real ball of fun...it can sit for hours and never get back on track. It has dns services, and the dns is set to point to its own IP and one of the centralized DCs over the wan link. After a reboot, everything starts up fine. However, in the meantime, the office of people are all rebooting in a panic and all have unassigned 169.x.x.x addresses on their Windows 7 machines. It's a perfect picture of the the typical IT Monday morning.
Short of physical power tricks...is there anything I could do, to delay some of these service startups until the link is up, or is there something that should be retrying this connection in order to get the services 'healed' and back in a usable state (dns/dfs/dhcp)?
Pete