I'm trying to join my windows 7 desktop to our companies domain. The domain is all set up and other win7 boxes are joined to the domain OK. When I try to join the domain, I get prompted for credentials, I enter the valid credentails, and then get the error "The network was was not found".
It seems that DNS servers are a common cause of this, so on IPConfig /all I can see I have a valid looking connection-specific DNS suffix, and I have 2 IPs in my DNS servers list (the same as another PC I looked at that is on the domain). I changed the ipv4 config to explicitly use these DNS server IPs rather than obtain automatically, to no avail.
I can access computers on the network (I get prompted for credentails which then works), its just joining the domain that doesn't work.
I'm not very skilled at AD / network issues so it might be something obvious 😉
[UPDATE]
It seems that we're using google public DNS (8.8.8.8) instead of one on our server. So the problem is likely to be that when trying to join the domain, the computer is using google to try and find the server FQN – which it isn't going to find. Is there a way round this? I tried changing the DNS server to the IP of the server, but it doesn't like that.
Best Answer
Then you'll want to setup Googles DNS Servers as 'Forwarders' inside the AD DNS Settings, so that way anything your servers can't resolve, Google DNS will take over.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754941.aspx -- This link will walk you through that process.