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 ...

Had the pleasure of install our first 2008 R2 Domain Controller today. All went splendidly, after following through the various MS documents on how to do it and what to check beforehand. Adprep had been run over a year ago as the project was sidelined several times due to other things getting in the way. Only glitch was that after running DCPromo on the new DC it restarted and whilst I could logon I couldn't get a desktop just a normal blue wallpaper. Only option was Ctrl+Alt+Del and to log off, even task manager wouldn’t run.  A reboot to safe mode with networking and all was well.  So I had a look in the event logs and spotted the following error The Windows logon process has failed to spawn a user application. Application name: . Command line parameters: C:\Windows\system32\userinit.exe Lots of Googling lead me to a MS kb article ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970879 ) which explains that if the Interactive and Authenticated users were not in the Local Users grou...