Hello everyone. I'm not totally certain this topic should go in this thread so if it should be elsewhere, mod's, of course feel free to move it. Thanks. Okay, I have a basic network setup at home. I have a Netopia wireless DSL router and connected to that I have a small network switch. In this room I have 6 personal PC's connected, all wired directly into either the Netopia or the switch. All of the PC's are running Windows XP Professional except for one, which is running Windows Server 2008. On 2 of the personal PC's I have Microsoft Virtual PC installed and have a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine on each of them. So that makes a total of 3 instances of Windows Server 2008 on my network - one installed directly on a PC and the other two being virtual machines. They each have hard coded IP address information and can ping the gateway (the Netopia) and devices on the Internet (I can ping yahoo.com, for instance). Here's some background on why I'm asking for help. My problem arises when I try to go through some exercises where I'm trying to get these 3 2008 servers to communicate with each other. The firewall's on them are off (I did this as a step to resolve the issue but it didn't make a difference) and they cannot ping one another. I tried to go through some Active Directory Domain Services and DNS exercises but couldn't get through half of them because the servers aren't communicating, or aren't able to communicate over the network. The exercise where I get stuck is trying to have me create a manual zone delegation. The exercise wants me to create a new zone in the forward lookup zones, which I'm able to accomplish. When I get to the part where it wants me to create a new delegation, that's where I get stuck. I put in the static IP address and it doesn't work. I get some error message (I can't remember what it says specifically) but I know it has to do with the servers not being able to communicate. Any help you can give me would be great.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255248 You didn't mention anything about having a .local domain or using active directory. It might be what you need to make it happen. How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.

Thanks for the idea. I'm just going through the exercises from a Microsoft Press book and it didn't mention anything about a .local domain, but it does mention frequently that using virtual machines for the exercises is a good idea. I'll check out the link you provided and get back to you.

Okay, I got it to work. Here's everything I did. I scrapped the whole thing and started over from scratch. I took a PC and installed Windows Server 2008 on it. Then on that PC I installed Virtual Server 2005 and created two new virtual machines with Windows Server 2008 as the OS. I updated all of the with the latest patches, turned off their firewalls and enabled Remote Desktop. I went through the exercises that had me at a standstill and I still ran into a problem. This whole exercise is about DNS. I looked at the error message I received and realized that I had my DSL router as the DNS server address in TCP/IP settings. I added the main server which should be the primary DNS server and made the DSL router the secondary and everything just worked from there. I know there were other problems besides this, but altogether scrapping the whole thing and starting over from scratch seems to have fixed the probelms I was having.

I'm glad to hear it worked. Sometimes starting over is the best thing. How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.