Ok, some background information. I am a business education teacher who HAS to get his lab up ASAP. Our tech is not available as he is working on the new phone systems in a brand new building and so this is all up to me.
We have a brand new Dell PowerEdge SC1430 server running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. I have 30 Dell client computers running Windows XP Professional.
All 30 of these machines have been completely reloaded and have nothing on them but Windows and the correct drivers.
Now, when I try to join the domain, 50% of the computers join the domain without hesitation or error, but the other 50% are throwing the following error…
“The following occurred attempting to join the domain “Student” The specified network name is no longer available.
Please note these machines are able to connect to the internet, and I can ping both the server and the gateway.
If anyone has a clue why these wont join, please advise!!
This sounds like you have duplicated names for machines somewhere.
I have seen this error and was able to fix it by making sure that all computers have the latest microsoft patches on them and are up to date. I would also make sure that you are on the same subnet and that there is not a problem seeing the server using DNS. You can test this by going to the computer that will not connect to the server and ping the server by its IP address. This will tell you if it is a DNS issue.
Good luck!
Try using the full UNC naming for the domain.
if your running active directory, make sure the DNS is properly setup on the server and point the systems to that for DNS resolution
you clearly have a physical connection there. I would say try and readd them to the domain first, and then verify the DNS entries which I would hope are static
other than that I’d verify the routing
ie. does half the room physically connect on a different switch then the first half?
are there damaged cables causing packet loss?
sorry I can’t be more help that’s a bit of a pickle without being able to do hand-on
First, compare the dns settings from a computer that you were able to join to the domain and one that you were not. You would do this by typing “ipconfig /all”. If the computer that does not connect points to a different DNS server or the DNS servers are listed in a different order that may be your problem. Also, you can test DNS resolution by typing “nslookup domain name” and see if you get a return. Your return should look like this note my domain name is AD:
Server: cfa1.ad.charliefraser.com
Address: 192.168.1.20
Name: ad.charliefraser.com
Address: 192.168.1.20
I hope this helps.