[fhmiv]

A follow-up question – should I be using WINS or should I add SRV entries for the PDC to my DNS?

I’m running Bind-9.2.2 and dhcp-3.0pl2 on an old Linux system. Can the 10.4 included Samba publish the SRV entries dynamically to the DNS or would I need to put them in by hand?

[fhmiv]

I appreciate the reply.

1) I don’t have any workgroups with the same name as the domain, but I agree, if I did, that I would experience problems with that set-up.

2) The new PDC does use the same domain name as the old PDC, and I agree with you that the SID mismatch is to blame. After I’d performed the upgrade and gotten the windows boxes all confused, I saw the advice on using samba’s net command to duplicate the old PDC’s SID to the new PDC. Maybe someday I’ll have the opportunity to try that.

I resorted to removing all the XP clients from the domain and re-joining them. The XP clients were still able to contact the domain intermittently. I used various command-line tools on the XP side, including the built-in net command as well as some others I downloaded such as the quite useful [url]http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/findpdc/index.htm[/url], as well as the client-side error messages during the domain join attempts and the messages in the Event log, to determine that the clients couldn’t find the domain.

The XP client TCP/IP settings state that the clients will revert to using netbios if no WINS server is specified, but that clearly wasn’t working reliably, so I just enabled the WINS server on the PDC, told the DHCP server to hand out its address for the netbios-related options for that subnet, rebooted the PDC, waited a while for things to settle out, and now all the clients can reliably find the PDC.

I still have no idea why the WINS-less set-up worked in 10.3 server but didn’t work in 10.4 server, but believe me, I’ll remember it now!

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