Hello everyone, I am in need of a bit of help... Here is the situation. I bought a new server for my personal network and wanted to get rid of the old one. In the process of transferring all the roles to the new system I toasted my network. Now this was pretty frustrating but I took it as an opportunity to change my network's name and to restructure AD. I removed all roles from the new system and restarted. I then installed all the roles I wanted including AD and DNS of course. This all went very smoothly and everything checked out. I then spent the better half of the day working on AD and transferring the settings from the old to the new user accounts in my workstation pcs. I woke this morning to a problem however. In my event viewer under system I get three errors just like this: __________________________________________________________ Dynamic registration or deletion of one or more DNS records associated with DNS domain 'ForestDnsZones.cdi.cdi.' failed. These records are used by other computers to locate this server as a domain controller (if the specified domain is an Active Directory domain) or as an LDAP server (if the specified domain is an application partition). Possible causes of failure include: - TCP/IP properties of the network connections of this computer contain wrong IP address(es) of the preferred and alternate DNS servers - Specified preferred and alternate DNS servers are not running - DNS server(s) primary for the records to be registered is not running - Preferred or alternate DNS servers are configured with wrong root hints - Parent DNS zone contains incorrect delegation to the child zone authoritative for the DNS records that failed registration USER ACTION Fix possible misconfiguration(s) specified above and initiate registration or deletion of the DNS records by running 'nltest.exe /dsregdns' from the command prompt or by restarting Net Logon service. Nltest.exe is available in the Microsoft Windows Server Resource Kit CD. ____________________________________________________________ They vary only by the domain being reported. The three are: 'ForestDnsZones.cdi.cdi.', 'DomainDnsZones.cdi.cdi.' and 'cdi.cdi.'. Now the fact that domain cdi.cdi is having a problem is not surprising as this was my OLD domain on the OLD DC which is now back on the network acting as a file server but with all the other roles removed (No AD or DNS). My new domain has a different name all together. I see no cdi.cdi records at all in the dns and have no idea why this system still looks for it even though everything else works fine. PLEASE tell me I do not have to reinstall and therefor re-do AD. If anyone has ANY suggestions I would me most appreciative.

I am surprised anything works from what you describe. You focus is on FSMO roles but you don't have an idea of AD and DNS. No mention of the Global Catalog. Let's start with what server version you were running on the old server. Is it EXACTLY the same version as the new server? Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search

Thanks for the slam there chief. I've figured it out. dcpromo didn't remove the entries in netlogon.dnb and .dns.

If you think that's all there is to it best of luck. BTW that wasn't a slam. I would kindly suggest you spend some time in an AD book and on Microsoft's web site. Microsoft recommends you have TWO DCs MINIMUM with both containing DNS, and the Global catalog. This is for AD failover as well as authenication load balancing. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search

"I bought a new server for my personal network" With maybe 8 devices on at any given time I don't see load balancing being an issue and if the server craps out I'll just start fresh. This isn't a mission critical server. I never pretended to be anything close to an expert here friend, I just came for some advise. Also, I thought multiple Global Cat servers cause excess replication traffic, am I wrong? And what problems are caused by not having the same version of 2003... This is not sarcasm, I really want to know since I was unable to go from a 2003 to a 2003 sp1 server without serious dns issues(caused by me setting up the new server wrong was my verdict).

No, multiple global catalogs do not cause excessive replication traffic. You should have had no issues with your server install since 2003 and 2003 sp1 are the same. If 2003 and 2003 R2 you would need to run adprep from the 2nd R2 cd. Same would be true if going from a 2000 forest to a 2003 forest. You would need to run adprep. Basic install would be to point the member server to the DC/DNS server via network properties and then run dcpromo. This installs AD on the server. Then you install DNS as Ad intergrated or secondary dns server. Check the box to be the GC and you should be fine. Understand you need to wait a bit to make sure AD/DNS has synced between the two. This is install in a nutshell. What you don't do is install DNS on the new server as itself. Then you have a problem of which dns server does AD talk to. If you installed a new dns server Ad would still be looking at the old dns. This is where I suspect the mistake was. Best of luck. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search

That is exactly what I did. Found out pretty much right after I finished that it was wrong and by that time there were so many problems I did not see the point in trying to recover, especially since this is not an important server. Thanks for the help.