We had a major power failure 3 weeks ago. The outage took long enough that APC couldn't keep server to alive before the power resume. So, all switches, firewall and servers were down.
During the outage, Site to site connection are disconnected. I tried to bring up the PDC [Physical box] after network admin brought up the local switches and Storage. [Except Firewalls for Site to Site connection].
All my domain admin accounts were failed to authenticate until the site to site connection restored..
After reviewing the Event logs, I found Event 2092 on the PDC. My research shows AD DS, DNS wasn't able to start and PDC was trying to validate its FSMO roles and it was failed as all replication partner were unreachable.
My question is:
1) Does PDC need to complete the Initial Sync with other partner before domain user can authenticate? My understanding is FSMO role has nothing to do with user authentication.
I was being questioned, if that is the case, there is no reason for having multiple DCs when PDC goes down....
Thanks in advance.