Quango's questions

Our company has three offices, and the main one is having problems with Outlook clients (both 2010 and 2013) unable to connect to hosted exchange server on MessageSteam. They spend a while "trying to connect" and then drop to "disconnected". The clients stopped connecting about 4pm yesterday (Tues 9th Feb) and are still offline this morning.

What we have tried so far:

• restarted Outlook
• restarted PC
• set to "offline" then set back to online
• installed windows updates
• checked DNS resolution: server https://cas.messageexchange.com/ is resolving fine
• checked service status on the MessageStream site (no issues) - it works at other locations
• a phone on wifi can't connect to Exchange, but on gsm network it can connect
• restarted the router
• restarted the local server that hosts DHCP, DNS

So now I've run out of ideas for things to check. Suggestions as to how to diagonose the problem are most welcome.

In recent weeks a weird problem has started in my office. The internet seems to stop working, but it has not failed, it's just DNS problems.

Setup:

ADSL2+ AnnexM connection via a Draytek Vigor 2820 router. Windows server domain running Server 2008 R2. A DNS server is set up on the server, and DNS forwarders set to the values sent to the router (141.1.1.1 and 195.27.1.1 - Thus/CW/Vodafone). I've also added Google's public DNS as backup (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

Symptoms

Most of the day the network works fine and web browsing works.

At various points of the day, DNS seems to stop working for external hosts so web browsing stops. There does not seem to be an obvious trigger, although it almost always fails about 4pm local time.

The ADSL line is still working (I run BBC radio 2 streaming over it and this does not stop), and the VPN links to the other office are also working. I can ping external IP addresses - so the problem definitely seems to be with DNS.

What I've Tried

I've tried diagnose the cause usingnslookup: it resolves only internal hosts, anything external times out. I tried setting the server to the CW and the Google ones directly, but this also times out:

> server 8.8.8.8
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
Default Server:  [8.8.8.8]
Address:  8.8.8.8
>

The only solution appears to be to reboot the router. After this everything works again for a while.

I did suspect the problem was with the router but we've not made any configuration changes. So do the assembled experts think this is a router issue or is the ISP?

I had installed DFSR (DFS replication) on two servers, but recently noticed that there is a separate RDC (Remote Differential Compression) feature in Server Manager, which was not installed.

DFSR documentation talks about RDC a lot, but it's not clear if the separate feature is installed as part of the DFSR role, if you had to install the separate feature to make this work.

I've googled RDC and DFSR to see if these are unrelated or not but could not find a definitive answer. Can anyone say if you need to install the RDC feature or not?

Our server (windows 2008 R2 server, fully patched) this morning was a bit slow.

Checking network activity I found several DNS sessions using quite a lot of bandwidth (10MB/sec per session). This was rather suspicious (I expect DNS traffic to be light) so I turned off DNS for the present.

Here is an image of some of the connections:

As you can see there is a varied list of hosts. Is this a vulnerability in DNS?

Running an SBS 2008 server for a client, who added a new office. I set up a Windows 2008R2 server at the new office, which was promoted to domain controller and GC (logon) server.

Both servers are connected via VPN and we can ping both over this. However, something is wrong with the AD replication: the logs on both have KCC 1311 errors in eventlog:

The Knowledge Consistency Checker (KCC) has detected problems with the following directory partition.
Directory partition: CN=Configuration,DC=xxxxxxxxx,DC=local There is insufficient site connectivity information for the KCC to create a spanning tree replication topology. Or, one or more directory servers with this directory partition are unable to replicate the directory partition information. This is probably due to inaccessible directory servers.

The Sites and Services setup is correct with the right subnets. If I add sitelink items on one server these get replicated to the remote server's info.. so something is getting replicated! DNS changes also get replicated. So I am confused - IS there a problem or isn't there?

When I tried to set up a DFS root on the SBS box and create a namespace on the remote server (from the SBS console) it fails with "Semaphore timeout".

We also discovered the other day that the 'Remote' site used for remote access and OWA isn't accessible from the new Win2008R2 server:

e.g. ping remote gives the correct IP address and responds: browsing to https://remote.xxxx.local starts but never actually gets through to the remote website (nothing appears on IIS logs). The same site works on the local LAN to SBS and externally from internet locations.

I have tried the various ADutils to test connectivity which all say it's fine.

So something is definitely wrong with the connectivity somewhere but we can't figure out what it is or where it is.

Have an SBS 2008 server in one location, and want to add a backup domain controller at a different site. The two sites are linked by a VPN.

New server is running Server 2008 R2, fully patched. At present it is a member server and the DNS is pointing at the SBS DNS.

When I try running DCPROMO to connect the server, the wizard runs fine up to the point where the wizard is 'configuring Active Directory Domain Services' and 'examining forest':

"The operation failed because:

The wizard could not read operational attributes from the remote Active Directory
Domain Controller SERVER.DOMAIN.LOCAL using LDAP.

"The specified server cannot perform the requested operation."

This error can occur if you have not been granted necessary permissions to read
data in the directory.  For more information, please see article 936241 in the
Microsoft Knowledge Base (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=88420)."

I was logged on as domain administrator. Interestingly the link is invalid and the KB article does not exist..!

Settings:

Have just had a new HP DL380 G6 server set up.

This has a SmartArray P410i controller and seven 2.5" 146Gb SAS 10k RPM disks, configured as three RAID1 arrays and a floating hot spare.

Problem: I did a disk performance test on the drives using DiskMark and got a really LOW performance figure: 167MB/sec read, 74MB/sec write.

Compare this with a two-year old Dell PERC5i (our current server) - this has a RAID1 array of two 66Gb SAS 10K drives - DiskMark rates this at 706MB/sec read and 622MB/sec write.

I've searched for drivers and bios on HP site not found any (except for drive spec changes).. Firmware on controller reports 1.62 and Windows x64 driver is version 6.14.0.64

Any suggestions? or is the HP SmartArray controller a dog with fleas?