mmthomas

If you want to be legal, using Windows Server for your web platform means that you need to have client access licenses for each person you expect to connect to your web site. If that is more than a handful, you may need to consider a per-processor CAL which allows unlimited connections. A good place to visit is The Official IIS site. There is a lot of information on IIS around the internet, but a lot of it is compartmentalized, meaning there will be sites for FrontPage that only talk about FrontPage and nothing else. Sites for ASP that mention nothing else. There is just a lot of information out there and it is difficult to give advice when there isn't much to go on. Hopefully the link above will give you some starting info.

I would say that Windows 2000 would be the oldest you would want to use, and preferably Win XP. That said, I have seen kb articles for connecting WinNT and Win98 workstations, but those take more work getting them to connect. And, as usual, some group policies will only work with XP or newer, or Vista or newer, etc.

If you are using WSUS, try this link.

The two _msdc folders are normal. No need to worry there. Your ipconfig looks okay, too. If you don't need to use the IPv6, I would consider disabling it. Sometimes that can cause network performance issues. Also, there is a possibility that your ISP has got something odd going on with their dns servers. It would also be worth a try to set your forwarder to a public DNS server, like 4.2.2.1, to see if that affects your resolution speed for internet addresses. Normally, your isp's servers should be faster since they are closer, but sometimes it's good to try a third party. Once you get your internal DNS working well, I would remove the secondary DNS server from the workstation. In a domain, you usually don't want the clients using an external DNS unless it is more important to have internet access than to access domain resources.

In gpmc.msc find the OU you want to attach your gpo. Right-click on the GPO and choose "Link existing GPO." That should bring up a list of the available policy objects. Select the one you want to apply your OU and click OK.

If you installed DNS when you installed Active Directory, and you used the default options, then you now have an Active Directory Integrated DNS. Active Directory will not work without DNS and removing your only DNS server could severely damage your domain. Do not uninstall DNS. The _msdcs folder is very important for your domain. When your clients start up they need to know what machine is the domain controller, where to get kerberos tickets and other domain-related information. They get it from the msdcs folder. So if your DNS is not always working, I wouldn't be surprised if you had slow logins and possible other issues. Having two NICs on the same subnet can cause some problems. It would be worthwhile to temporarily disable the one you use for your vms and see if your DNS performance changes. The fact that you've had this problem for a while and with a previous server makes me think that there may be some other network or configuration problem. Could you perhaps post an "ipconfig /all" from one of your clients?

No, the mailbox is tied to the user account and not the computer account.

What Exchange Server issue?

Open Active Directory Users and Computers on your server. Look under the Computers folder unless you move your machines to their own OU. Find the old computer name and delete it. Then join the new PC to the domain.

Yes, you don't have to have the reverse zone, but one minor side effect is that you won't get the fqdn on your clients with your nslookup requests. Not a big deal. Just to be safe, try running DCDIAG from a command line on the server. There are a few basic DNS tests that it runs. Check that it passes them. In your forward lookup zone, under your domain name, are all of your computers showing up there with their IP addresses? Is the Start of Authority record pointing to your server name? Same for the NS record in there?

Hello, Chris, and welcome to the forum. You might take a look at the links in this thread to get started with setting up your domain.

It's okay that the server is showing 127.0.0.1 local host. That's essentially the same as it showing its own 192.168. address. The clients should be reporting the FQDN of your dns server there, though it is not necessarily fatal to dns. The timeout and unknown server name may simply be because reverse ip lookup is failing. Do you have a reverse lookup zone in your DNS? Is your server's IP in that zone? The timeout isn't pretty, but as long as it is resolving names to ip addresses, then it is probably working properly. Did you try to resolve some internet names from nslookup, like www.google.com, etc? Also, on your forwarder, I would set it to the IP of your ISP's DNS servers. It'll work the way you have it, but it's just another layer of relaying that has to occur for each lookup.

This Microsoft KB has some info about DNS in Win2008, including how to add forwarders. If you don't have a forwarder specified, than your DNS will contact the root servers for name resolution. You should set your forwarder to your ISP's DNS server, though you can also set to other public DNS servers if your ISP isn't reliable. It isn't usually helpful to help The clients should only be using the secondary DNS server if the first server is unavailable,i.e. it fails to respond to a query. So you may be having some other problem with your DNS server. Using the nslookup command from the command line can help find problems. When you have problems run it on both the dns server and on the client workstation. You should get the same results on both. It will tell you want server you are using by default and whether you connected successfully to it. You can then do lookups from the command line. You can also change the dns server you are checking against.

Hi, Dave. Welcome to the forum.

It is probably a permissions issue. When you renamed the default and admin folders, did you swap permissions, too? The default folder is going to have read access for everyone, while the admin folder had permissions limited to system and administrators, most likely. Here is the Microsoft recommended method for updating the default user profile in Win7.

I haven't worked with these, but perhaps this link would help.

You say that the client has been added to dns and is getting dhcp. Is it an actual member of the domain? Can you access from the the Run line the system volume shown in the error message? (\\test.local\sysvol\...) All authenticated users should have read/execute access to that share. That error message makes it sound like you don't have permissions or some other network problem is causing the client to not be able to read the policy. Make sure you can access the entire path shown in the error. Another possibility is that you have added a security filter to your gpo that is preventing access to the gpo to the user. You would see that in the gpmc console.

Run gpresult.exe (command prompt) or rsop.msc (gui). These tools can help you discover if the gpo is showing as applied or filtered out for some reason. For some gpos there may also be an event log which explains why a policy didn't apply (for example an error when it tried to map a drive). If you have multiple DCs you may also have a replication issue where the gpo is on one DC but hasn't replicated to other DCs. If the user logging on hits a DC that doesn't have the policy or has a corrupt copy of the gpo, that will cause problems, too.

As far as your 2008 server goes, you shouldn't have to do anything to it unless there is something you haven't mentioned above. If you set the new router with the same IP addresses as the old gateway device, your server shouldn't care what that device is.

Just checking is this server the passive node? You can't install updates on the active node in the cluster.

Welcome to the forum, Hasan.

You can use remote desktop to login remotely to your server. If you have a firewall/router, you need to be able to forward TCP port 3389 traffic from your public IP address to your internal server address. If your server is directly connected to your internet connection, you need to open that firewall port on the server. If you have setup your server as a domain controller, you can use group policy to assign software and have it installed to a computer when the user logs on. Not every program can be installed this way and you still need to be aware of licensing. You can useBGinfo for this. By default it includes a lot more info, but you can remove the stuff you don't want.

Well, here are some things to look at or try which, even if they don't fix the problem, will hopefully get some more information. 1) Check your event logs for any warnings or errors that occur when the system starts up. 2) Your RAID controller may have software in the Start menu that allows you to check the status of drives in the array. Check this for errors. 3) Try to start the server in safe mode with all the drives on. If it starts in safe mode, then there is a problem with a device, driver or service. 4) Run msconfig (from Start > Run). You can use this to try to narrow down the issue if the safe mode start worked, or for further troubleshooting if the safe mode start didn't work. You can use the options on the General tab to do a diagnostic setup and then restart, or a selective startup to turn off things like startup items. You can use the other tabs for more granular control of what to turn off. 5) See if the mirrors are actually working. Have a full backup before doing this. The easiest way to do this is probably to mount the mirror drive as a slave in another machine and check the date of the data. You don't want to swap the mirrors with the main drives because if they are out of date, but then the mirror works when you start up, you'll overwrite your good disks. Skip this step if you're not comfortable with it. Doing the above may involve several restarts, which may take some time if it's taking a half hour to start up. Keep an eye on what drives are available before and after restarts. Ideally, have a full backup of the machine before you start messing with it. Possibilities off the top of my head: 1) The RAID card (if you have one) isn't working correctly. In this case, you are starting up with, for example, the C and D drives on and their mirrors off. If you can't get the machine to start at all with all the drives turned on, I would suspect this. Hopefully your RAID controller company included a diagnostic utility that can be run to verify functioning. However, you might be using software drive mirroring through Windows disk management. If that is the case you could break the mirror and then recreate it. Make sure you have a good and verified full backup before doing this. 2) A bad driver or software is trying to load from the D drive. In this case, your server starts up when the D drive and its mirror are off because it can't get to the bad driver/software that is keeping windows from loading. If this is the case, then one of the above methods should help find the problem. 3) Other hardware issue. One of the mirror drives or related connections could be bad. Again, the raid diagnostic utilities could be helpful here. That's not a complete list, but there are some troubleshooting steps you can use to further narrow down the cause. I can't stress enough not to start messing with the drives and RAID setup without having a backup of the machine in case something goes horribly wrong.

A little more detail would be helpful. It sounds like you have four hard drives total in your raid array. Is that correct? Are these drives internal to the server or in some sort of external enclosure? When you say that you "turn off" the middle two drives, do you mean that you are removing them from the server's drive slots? When you say "raid array," what do you mean? Do you mean that you have two hard drives that are each mirrored to another hard drive? Or perhaps a set of two striped disks that are mirrored to two more? Or some other raid configuration. When you boot up with the two middle drives turned off, do you have missing drives? (i.e. The C drive is present, but now the D drive is not there.)

You may want to check out this link. While you may not think you installed updates, installing the hypervisor probably downloaded updates in the background.