All fixed up

I was actually relieved to know that my domain problems were caused by a bad hard drive.  Even though it’s time-consuming, it was a halfway easy fix after hitting up some knowledge base goodness.

Since the DC’s hard drive was dead, I had to use ntdsutil to remove the dead computer and all of its metadata from Active Directory (the article I used is here).  While this was going on, I had a clean install of 2003 Server cranking out on a new disk.  Once it was ready, it joined to our domain with no difficulty.  The DC promo process went smoothly, and roughly 14.5 hours after the incident was reported, things were back to normal.

…and I didn’t have to crack open that bean and rice soup, either… although I might anyway.

More than it seems – Update

Well as it turns out, before I could even get a chance to ghost the offending hard drive in our DC, the drive failed entirely.  I now have a smoking hot hard drive on the table.

So now begins the process of not only rebuilding a DC, but also “forcibly removing” the old DC from our domain.  Fortunately, I’ve got a big bowl of rice and bean soup, and 2 different kinds of hot sauce.

It’s gonna be a fun evening.

More than it seems

Last week before I went on a mini vacation, I set up a new user account for a staffer.  I issued them their username and password, got them connected to Exchange, and everything seemed to be just hunky-dorey.

This past Tuesday I got a call from my boss.  Apparently the user wasn’t able to receive email, although they could send it just fine.  I checked out the normal stuff… permissions, time sync across the servers, the usual.  Not knowing what to do yet, I went ahead and backed up the user’s Exchange data and deleted the mailbox with the intent of starting over.  After re-creating the mailbox, I was quite perplexed to find that I could no longer even connect to Exchange with this user’s account.

I’m not sure what let me do to it, but I remoted to both DCs to take a look at their AD structure side-by-side.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were user accounts missing from our #2 DC.  A further look into the event logs shows that replication between the 2 DCs has been stopped due to a bad computer account.  Because of this, not only is Active Directory broken on this DC, but DNS services (which are relying on AD) are broken as well.  Digging further into the event log, I find that the system is getting hardware errors while attempting to write to the hard disk, which is what corrupted the computer account responsible for shutting down AD replication.

Fast-forward a little to Black Friday.  I don’t shop on Black Friday.  Ever.  However, I am looking over the hard disk that our 2nd DC runs off of.  A disk scan is turning up massive amounts of physical errors on this drive, and although I’d like to try ghosting the system onto a new disk, there’s a good chance that I am going to be building “ripping out” this system from the domain with a little help from the MS Knowledge Base.  It’s a little frustrating to be repairing this domain with a rebuild happening at the same time, but I don’t want to take any chances

We’ll see how this works out.

Quite refreshing.

I was chatting with Justin Moore this morning and he pointed me to this link…probably the funniest campaign ad I’ve seen.

O-H…

…I-O