I am a help desk technician at an accounting firm with approx. 250 users and 4 remote offices. We have auditors that take their laptops out to their audit clients' offices. Many times, when they return, their laptops have to be added back to domain when no network settings have been changed. We just right click my computer as normal and remove the .local off of the domainname.local. That works every time, but we should not have to do this time after time.
Another major issue that is related, is that when the 90 day network password limit runs out, they login and then system prompts them to change password. once they have changed their password and click OK to save, they get a message that says, "Your password could not be changed because the domain, domainname.local, could not be found." They call us in support, we change password through active directory and all is well. we are running Win 2k3 Server Environment, with Symantec Corporate SAV 10.1.5.5000. Users are all running WinXP SP2.
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When they take them offsite and login are they trying to log into the domain that isn't connected or are they logging into the local machine? And are you using roaming profiles? I will have to pull a laptop and test it here to see if I can create that problem, because I have never seen it.
I have run into this with computers that NEVER leave the office. 99% of the time If I remove that computer account from AD, then re-add that computer using the "Network ID" option instead of just changing from a workgroup to a domain, it sticks.
Definitely sounds like a DNS configuration issue. Are you using DHCP to dole out IP info, including DNS settings? Could it be that the domain suffix isn't specified in these settings from DHCP? That might explain why bringing them back to the office could cause DNS issues when they refresh their IP configurtion on the local network.
Sometimes you carpe diem, sometimes your diem gets carped.
In Microsoft DHCP it is a scope setting called domain name. Same for DHCP on Cisco routers. I was just wondering if the client is confused by not having an appropriate domain name suffix attached to its IP configuration. This can also be set manually in a Windows IP configutation by specifying "DNS Suffix" in the DNS section of the settings.
I haven't run into this issue specifically, but it does sound like a DNS issue or an issue with Active Directory, which of course depends on DNS.
Sometimes you carpe diem, sometimes your diem gets carped.
Win2k3 And active directory always assume that the main Win2k3 server is also the DNS server for all clients, and also the DHCP server, in order to make sure that all clients get the right settings. In fact, I had a weird problem here in the office, where suddenly user logins were taking forever, and Outlook wouldn't authenticate at all. Turned out, that the DHCP in my router had been changed, and suddenly the DHCP leases refreshed, with the wrong info. So DNS and DHCP are essential to proper WIn2k3 doamin operation.. As stupid as it is. Anyway, when the laptops go out the door, the DHCP info they recieve from whatever routers they happen to be behind at the time, no longer reflects the settings for the domain. Then as someone mentioned, the users are telling their laptops that they are still logging into the domain, but the computer can't find it, so it fakes it - the doamin.local thing.
All this stuff was so much simpler in NT! I'd still rather use NT, come to think of it!
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