My Windows server environment was experiencing various odd symptoms after I decommissioned the forest's first server. (It was 10 years old, it was time to go before it just died). I had moved all the essential network services to other servers, and followed the procedures I found on technet for moving AD roles to other servers before decommissioning.
I downloaded and ran the AD replication status tool, as I was having troubles that seemed AD related. The tool reports one error, says "Failed to collect data against node xxx.xxx.org", and"Domain controller xxx.xxx.org does not exist or could not be contacted."
I subsequently found a lot of entries in the DNS servers that pointed back to the server that had been decommissioned, and also static IP entries on servers that pointed to that server. After fixing these, AD seems to be functioning fine. In fact, the log on the server xxx.xxx.org says, as of 5 pm yesterday
"All problems preventing updates to the Active Directory Database have been cleared. New updates to the Active Directory database are succeeding. The Net Logon service has restarted."
So I can't really find a problem pointing to an AD problem any longer, yet the AD replication status tool still insists that xxx.xxx.org has problems. What steps can I take to discover why the tool can't communicate with the server, which is obviously running?