Connect domain controller Windows Server 2003 to another one on Windows Server 2003

active-directorydomain-controllerrpcwindows-server-2003

In Active directory, when I try to connect to another domain controller, after adding that domain controller and press ok, a message appears to me:

The following domain controller could not be contacted, the RPC server is unavailable

How can I fix this problem.

Best Answer

I agree with others that your questions is definitely not clear enough; anyway, since I've been fighting with a similar issue for all yesterday, I feel compelled to answer.

This can depend on a lot of things:

  • Can the two computers actually talk to each other? Check with ping, mapping a network share, etc.
  • Are they on the same subnet or on different ones? If they are on different ones, is there a firewall in the middle?
  • Is the first domain controller (and the domain as a whole) operating correctly? Can you f.e. succesfully log on to domain computers, browse AD, etc.? You can perform a full check on them with DCDIAG.
  • Is DNS consfigured correctly on the new DC? Does it use as its DNS servers the domain's already existing domain controllers, and only them (no external DNSs please!)?
  • Is the tyme sync ok between the new DC and the current ones?
  • Is the new DC already a domain member? If not, can you try joining it to the domain and then performing the DCPROMO after this is done (and logged in as a domain admin)?
  • Related to the preceeding item: how are you logging in to the domain? I've been getting exactly that error because I was running DCPROMO with a local Administrator on the new DC, so I had to specify domain credentials for the promotion... and someone had filled the "domain" field with the domain's FQDN instead of the NetBIOS name. Everything was working perfectly, but I kept getting that "RPC server is unavailable" (quite misleading, BTW).
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