Connecting Vista/Win7 Clients to SBS2011 AD

active-directorywindows 7windows-sbs-2011

With a new SBS 2011 server a customer ordered from Dell, I was trying to connect some Windows Vista Business and Windows 7 Professional clients to it, and I keep getting errors. So, I mustered up all my experience to try to troubleshoot some reasons.

  1. Checked the time. The server was set to MST time zone while all the clients were in PST. Moved the server TZ, no change. Time is within 1 minute of the clients
  2. Can I ping the server? Absolutely, by DNS Name and by IP Address
  3. Can the server ping back? Yup
  4. Are the DNS services running? Yes. Just a simple DNS server, the one Windows automatically configures for you (Domain name is company.local)

After this, I kept getting confused… I then re-tried going to http://connect, but I kept getting a 404 error. When going through the Network ID wizard, it says it can't find my Computer account. So, just to try something, I create the computer names in the Active Directory, and set up each user to manage their own workstation. It gets to the part about not having an account, so I type in an Admin username/password, or even the user's server U/P. Now, it's just a blank error when trying to join:

Error joining domain *domain*.local. The error message is as follows:

And that's the end of the error. No error number or nothing. I tried restarting the server and the workstations, but this is the furthest I get.

So my basic question is, what other troubleshooting can I do to connect Windows Vista or 7 to a SBS2011 server?

UPDATE The client is getting a new MODEM ONLY from the ISP, and will update on Tuesday

Best Answer

A few things to check:

  • Can you nslookup the SBS2011 box from the workstations? Where does the response come from?
  • What is the DNS server listed by ipconfig /all on a work station?
  • What is providing DHCP, the SBS2011 box or a router?

This error is typically caused by the DNS server being configured to a router, which has no knowledge of 'connect' or a few other CNAME/A records Windows needs to join a domain. The workstations need to either have their DNS set manually to the servers IP or the routers DHCP needs to be disabled so SBS2011 can take it over and correctly distribute DNS entries.

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