Hi All,
The missus recently acquired a MacBook Air that I wanted to add to the home domain. I have Windows Server 2012 Essentials running as my only server with 5 Windows 8 clients currently.
What has this got to do with DNS / AD?
Well after installing the Connector on the MacBook, I tried to bind it to the domain an I receive an Authentication error (Authentication Server could not be contacted (5200)). A bit of Googling, and it appears Macs are very fussy about the DNS setup when you're adding them to a domain, so I thought I'd go through and check my DNS & AD settings.
At this point I noticed a number of issues :
- In the DNS logs there is a constantly recurring error - EventID 4015, The DNS server has received a critical error from Active Directory.. The extended error debug information (which may be empty) is "". This occurs roughly twice a day on *most* days. I can't find any other related DNS/AD errors
- The second curiosity was that when I looked at the Server Manager > DNS, I see one DNS server listed, MYSERVER. When I fire up DNS Manager I see two servers, MYSERVER and myserver.mydomain.local. The properties for both appear to be identical, I just wan't sure if I should be seeing the FQDN entry as well since none of the setup examples I've followed have it
- If I fire up NSLOOKUP I get the error "DNS request timed out", "Default Server : Unknown"
- If I go to the properties of either MYSERVER or myserver.mydomain.local and select Monitoring then fire up a simple DNS query test it fails
- If I run dcdiag /test:dns on the server it fails the "initial required tests" stating "The host is <<36 character string>>._msdcs.Mydomain.local could not be resolved to an IP address. After this "Got error while checking LDAP and RPC connectivity. Further down the listing are two entries - Error No LDAP conectivity - Warning adapter MYADAPTER has an invalid DNS server : 192.168.1.240 (this is the server IP) & Warning adapter MYADAPTER has an invalid DNS server : 192.168.1.2 (this is the router IP). All DNS servers are invalid. No host records (A or AAAA) were found for this DC. The 36 character string does have a record (Alias) in the forward lookup zones of both the server entries listed under DNS Manager
Going this far I assume I've right royally screwed up the DNS config, even though it appears to be working for the Windows 8 clients.
As far as the DNS setup goes on each client and the server, every computer has the server IP as the primary DNS and the router (which is also running as the DHCP server) as the secondary. The router has the ISP DNS servers listed as primary and secondary.
Given the above I'm not sure where to start troubleshooting. Or, do I remove the domain and start again? Is there a DNS / AD setup guide for Windows Server 2012 Essentials for basic home setups?
Thanks!