Ran into an interesting situation this week, a client who had a previous consultant set up their small AD and the previous guy assigned it the domain name "honolulu.com" which is, of course, a domain name out in the world. Problem is…it's not their domain name. They have two servers - 1 Exchange server and a GC/DC which also (against my advice) is their ISA server. The GC/DC is Win2000, the Exchange runs Win2K3.
Their Exchange server is having difficulty starting up, LDAP errors that hint at DNS problems and I'm wondering if the issue is that internal domain name. The event viewer is full of MSADC errors that say the LDAP server is down. I suspect that maybe it's trying to connect to the LDAP server at the public honolulu.com domain.
Their internal DNS seems properly configured and does correctly list their DC/GC server. We can ping the DC/GC from the Exchange server by name or IP address. But Netdiag's DNS tests fail when run on the DC/GC server.
If we start the Exchange server it basically hangs at the "Applying Computer Settings" stage. None of the Exchange services start up, due to the LDAP errors, apparently.
I've been Googling but I have a feeling I'm looking in the wrong places.
Any thoughts?
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr
Operations Coordinator
Stockholm/KSG - Honolulu
Phone: (808) 535-1500
Mobile: (808) 351-5084
