I mentioned that my home office Windows 2000 domain controller died on Sunday. Fortunately it lingered for the day, giving me enough time to relocate Active Directory and DNS on another Windows 2000 server on the network.
A third server on my LAN presented me with the puzzling incident. Typically I feel my programming day is equivalent to putting together a crossword puzzle, an analogy I enjoy as long as it doesn't extend beyond the application level to the OS or network level. So this server all of the sudden took 15+ minutes to boot up. It hung at “Preparing Network connections” for 10 of those minutes, then on login to the network requiring another 5 or more minutes to “load my personal settings.”
I knew it had to do with new location of Active Directory and DNS, but what? And when you have to sit through 15 minutes of watching a computer boot up, you have to be deliberate in your decision making to avoid wasting another 15 minutes watching a computer boot up. Then it hit me that I was supplementing normal DNS services with a few LMHosts records on that particular server and I had changed the IP address of the new domain controller to match the old PDC (which seemed to get Exchange 2000 to talk to Active Directory the day of the crash.) So it was looking for network services at the wrong address, and because the numbers were hard-coded in its brain via the lmhosts file it got all confused. “Dave, I was just doing what I was programmed to do....“
Darned boring incident and a pure signal-free post, but the satisfaction of seeing that server boot up in its usual two minutes was pretty sweet.
The two pics below were taken during my daily mid-morning walk with the dogs on a biking path here in South Burlington, Vermont. Just felt like adding some color to the blog.