There are a ton of things that can go haywire when trying to join an
NT/2000 domain. Fortunately, this is one of the easier ones to work
around.
Since we were able to troubleshoot this problem in the clarifications,
this answer serves mainly to explain what caused the problem, clarify
the solution, and detail how to avoid this in the future.
The cause of the problem is actually fairly straightforward once you
understand some of the concepts; Windows 2000 Pro (and XP, I assume)
uses a fully-qualified domain name to address machines on an NT/2000
domain. Thus, it's not enough that a machine can resolve another
machine via NetBIOS or numeric IP address; it must be able to resolve
it through DNS over TCP/IP. When you try to bring a new machine into
the domain, the first thing that machine does is seek the Domain
Controller for the target domain. It does so (I believe) by
broadcasting the request on the network. The Domain Controller picks
up this broadcast and responds by returning its full domain name to
the workstation. Once the workstation has this name, it attempts to
look it up on the DNS to resolve a numeric IP address.
This, of course, is where you ran into your problem. Since your domain
was strictly local, the domain name server you were using had no idea
where to find it and so returned an error. Thus, you got "network path
not found". From the workstation's point of view, this is entirely
correct, but it's not a very informative error message. A more
accurate message might read, "Could not resolve the domain name."
That, at least, would give you a place to start looking for the
problem... but I digress.
To resolve this issue, we simply told the workstation where to look to
find the correct DNS record for your domain: in this case, the Domain
Controller itself. The easiest way to avoid this mess altogether is to
use DHCP for IP address assignment and make sure your DC is in the
list of assigned domain name servers. That way, even systems that
haven't joined the domain yet but are on the network know to look to
the DC for name resolution.
I hope you find this information useful. Most of it, including the
suggestion with DHCP, comes from my own long experience struggling
with Windows's peculiarities, but for backup I referred to the
following links:
Cannot Add Windows 2000 Computer to Domain:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;269264
When You Try to Add Workstation to Domain...:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;285182
Here is some general information about the way Windows 2000 server
handles DNS:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;291382
And some general information about Active Directory:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;260371
This link provides some information about how Windows 2000 uses DNS to
look up the numeric IP addresses of other machines on the network.
Although it is specifically talking about domain replication, the
process described for the lookup is pretty consistant any time a
machine is resolved on a domain:
http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBL/tip5700/rh5744.htm
And finally, here's a series of Technet articles detailing the
intricacies of Active Directory and DNS:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/columns/profwin/pw1200.asp
The links listed above were found by searching support.microsoft.com
for "network path not found", and searching Google for "domain
controller DNS resolution". |
