CBruce's questions

Environment:

From: Windows XP-Pro x64

To: Windows 10 Pro

A user "left" the company and we found a Win XP-Pro x64 workstation under his desk - but no user/password for login.

I've taken the SATA drives (no RAID - JBOD) out of the XP box and put them into a Win 10 box to find out what's on them. But I can't access the 2nd disk.

Running Disk Management on Win 10 box:

• XP boot disk is good - see all partitions and able to assign drive letters.
• XP second disk - see all partitions, but unable to access any of them.
  • [Change Drive Letter] is greyed out for all three partitions on 2nd disk.

Am I missing something simple?

We own a primary domain:

• businessdts.com

I didn't know if our admins had created a sub-domain I had requested, "BDASERVER.businessdts.com.", so I just tried to connect to it with a browser and got a "not found". Then I pinged that sub-domain and got an IP address that doesn't belong to us:

• Pinging BDASERVER.businessdts.com [198.105.244.117] with 32 bytes of data
• Our domain and all sub-domains should have an IP address of [173.203.24.209]

I had the admins check all of our DNS zones and we find no instance of the BDASERVER sub-domain, (the admins had not created it yet), nor did we find any instance of the 198.105.244.117 IP address.

Doing an IP lookup, we found that 198.105.244.117 belongs to a company called Search Guide Inc. (searchguideinc.com). They appear to be a domain broker of some kind.

Am I missing something:

• How is this BDASERVER sub-domain resolving to a address that is not ours?
• How does someone hijack a SUB-domain?

Windows 2008 R2 servers:

• No Active Directory
  • All servers are WorkGroup members - not domain members
• No internal DNS servers
• Single NICs
• IIS 7.5
• Each server has its own Windows SMTP Server

These servers send email notifications, through on-server SMTP servers, to our customers when they have activity. We are having some email bounce-backs that are saying they can't resolve the sending server name.

I'm looking at a lot of things - DNS, SMTP, etc. But I'm wondering if it is something as simple as this....

• Does the [system properties][primary dns suffix] on our Windows 2008 servers have anything to do with internet connections?

I believe that this setting only affects intranet connections, and not internet connections - (since it's not a connection level dns suffix that gets set per-connection in the network interface settings).... but I don't want to try to fix something unless I'm sure of all the moving pieces.