Hello. First I will give you the background...sorry if it is wordy, but I'd like to avoid back and forth on basic questions. I am trying to set up a DR set of machines that will be sent offsite. I've duplicated all our critical servers on a seperate network from the main (SQL server, Mail Server, Accounting server, Payroll). All boxes are 2003 and all are EXACT duplicates made by pulling the mirrored drive from original server and rebuilding mirror set on duplicate. The only server I didn't duplicate this way is the DC. I added a 3rd DC to the 2 I normally have, set it up as Global Catalog server, set it up as DNS server, etc and then moved it to the duplicate(DR) network.
Here's the problem. On the DR network, I power everything up go to log on. Some of the servers log on to the domain, some do not. The ones that do not give the message about "Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found", which is not true in either case because the DC is on the same switch and the account is for sure there. I log in to these servers locally and nslookup the domain and get back all the IPs for all 3 DCs. I then set the NIC on the DR DC to have the other DNS server's IPs as secondary addresses just in case and the servers still can't log in.
I've read a few posts to 'delete and re-add' the computer account to fix this, but with my Mail server and SQL/IIS server being the problems, I don't think this is a good idea as I will probably screw up the mail at least. I thought it might be due to the DR server not having the FSMO roles assigned, but it is really only acting as a BDC and it should not need these roles for validation, only AD and Global catalog (correct me if I am wrong).
Any suggestions (besides just delete and re-add the machine) will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Bill
