Finally some time to relax; the past week has been more than hectic. I got all my new gear last Friday night and thus spent all weekend Iincluding Monday which I had off work) painting the internals of my new case, assembling everything and the majority of the time unsuccessfully truobleshooting the issues that I came across. At the end of the weekend I had 2 non-functioning, yet assembled computers.

I was planning to get some work done on these during the week, but work was insanely busy with a critical issue we had with our primary domain controller. For some reason, when any user attempted to log on it was a lottery whether the domain controller would respond properly and load their profile and security settings over the network. It was functioning to the extent it would accept/deny a user for the correct username and password; but beyond that it was pot luck whether the computer would pull down security / profile settings, scripts etc. You could get it working by restarting the PC / logging on and off, as many times as required to make it work…there seemed to be no logic in the problem or solution what so ever. I ended up sounded exactly like the guys from The IT Crowd, “have you tried turning it off and then on again?”.

Fortunately I resolved the problem via use of dcdiag.exe and also by setting up a secondary domain controller on a virtual machine. I resolved several issues using dcdiag.exe and then troubleshooting individual problems, but a key problem we had was that the schema for our domain was not a 2003 schema, even though we are running a 2003 domain. We upgraded our domain from 2000 to 2003 in mid February, part of which you have to run forest and domain preps to upgrade the schemas from 2000 to 2003 before the upgrade; without this the upgrade installation will not continue. Which puzzles me, as the upgrade needed the upgraded schema before installing…yet this week I find that the schema was not the appropriate version. Anyway, while setting up a VM as a domain controller it would not join itself because the schema was incorrect which was the only way I found out about this. After upgrading the schema as well as fixing a few other errors all my domain login issues dissapeared…which was great, I didn’t have to spend all day restarting and re-logging people in until it magically worked!

Anyway, back to the computers, I am still reinstalling my gamer and server and have a heap of photos etc of the whole process which I will put up later in the weekend as well as a bit of documentation on the process and problems encountered…time for another beer.