Hi,

We have two Win 2K3 servers. One in office A and the other in office B.
Both are Domain Controllers, but office A is the PDC. After a extend
period of time, server in office B is unable to comunicate with server
in office A.  The network connection is up, but through AD its unable
to see the other server. After a reboot it works, but it disappears
after a little while. Not sure why this is happening. Somone has
suggest to demote the server in Office B and promote it again. Not sure
if this will work though. Any ideas or suggestions?

What type of connection do you have between the two Sites?  And, I assume
that you have set up things properly in Active Directory Sites and Services
(although that should really not have too much to do with this problem)?
Also, are these connections 'reliable'?  What does that mean?  Well, if you
are in a large metropolitan city (like Los Angeles or Berlin or Tokyo) then
you assume that the connection is reliable.  Obviously, that can be the
farthest from the truth, but normally this should not be a problem.
However, if you are in, for example) a South American county (like Columbia
or Peru) where there are supposedly frequent problems with the quality of
the connection (not trying to offend anyone) this might be the problem.  If
this is the case then you might want to look at SMTP for your replication
transport (instead of RPC-IP).

Do you have a Firewall-to-Firewall VPN set up?  There was a post in here
earlier about something very similar and PaulW had a good question.

Have you run the usual things (dcdiag /v and netdiag /v and repadmin)?
Also, we assume that everything with DNS is correct?

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Run diagnostics against your Active Directory domain.

If you don't have the tools installed, install them from your server install
disk.
d:\support\tools\setup.exe

Run dcdiag and netdiag in verbose mode.

If you download a gui script I wrote it should be simple to set and run.  It
also has the option to run individual tests without having to learn all the
switch options.  The script also automagically outputs the test details to a
text file and calls this text file up at the completion of the test.  This
makes it much easier to read and save the details for future use and
analysis.

The script is at http://pbbergs.dynu.com/windows/windows.htm, download it
and save it to c:\program files\support tools\

Just select both dcdiag and netdiag make sure verbose is set.  (Leave the
default settings for dcdiag as set when selected)

When complete search for fail, error and warning messages.


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Upgrading to Windows 2003 from Windows 2000
AD replication after a year
W2K3 server time slow
Error in Accessing Primary Domain Controller from Backup Domain Controller
Authentication problems on member server (file/print)
Replace Primary DC with new 2003 Server
Set et "inherit from parent the permission" on multiple user objects at same time
User Name in AD
Restricting User Logons
2000 - 2003 Migration