The Grumpy IT Admin

As part of our DR strategy we replicate or servers to our DR site. This now includes a couple of 2008 R2 Domain Controllers. For DR testing we will bring these replicas up and then the other servers in the isolated environment. However, bring the DC up in isolated seems to cause a problem. this varies fom never being able to log on to having to wait for an hour before we can logon. Once we have logged on thy event log seems to indicate a problem with DNS, and yet I can't as nail what the problem is. One of the problems we face is that we set up or domain wrong in the first place. For those of you that remember the Windows 2000 AD design exam we should have gone for the multi forest Ski lodge model but ended up with a single domain and bunch of autonomous sub domains, this was fine under Windows/Exchange 2000 (just) and 2003 (better) but under Windows 2008/R2 and Exchange 2010 is starting to look severely broken or at least more awkward to mange then it needs to be. Now whether ...

After some dancing with developers, I managed ot get some time to upgrade our EqualLogics. The main reason for teh delay was teh small number of servers that had direct attached iSCSI drives that needed to be updated to the latest HIT Kit and would therefore probably need a reboot. As it turns out, upgrading from 3.3.1 or higher to 3.5.1 didn't require a reboot. The Firmware updates went quite smoothly, this was a case of getting various polls on different updates on to the latest 5.0.7 version, including some stuck on the last version 4 release. After all the updates and server reboots I found that two servers would no longer replicate using the ASM. One was fine replicating at the EqualLogics level and just contained a bunch of flat files so I have left it as is. the other is our 2003 Exchange system. This was rather weird as the ASM was showing the iSCSI drive as "Unknown Type" and shows Exchange as being on unsupported drives. When I tried replicating the Datab...