I'm building home infrastructure from scratch -- I formatted all of my
machines (servers and workstations) to bring a new AD online.  With a fresh
install of Windows 2000 Advance Server and default (wizard) installation of
Advanced Server, it takes about 90 seconds to log onto the domain -- it gets
stuck on the "applying personal settings."

Looking in the event log, I would get the following application error which
reads:

  "Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. (The
  specified domain either does not exist or could not be
  contacted. ). Group Policy processing aborted. "

Troubleshooting this problem traces back to a misconfigured DNS -- when
you're behind a NAT firewall and don't have an authoritative external DNS
server reflecting your chosen domain name, you have to enable zone transfers
to any machine as well as assign name servers (as well as DNS servers) in
the DHCP scope options.

This fixes all of the event log problems except one:

  "Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. (The RPC
  server is unavailable. ). Group Policy processing aborted."


My questions are:

  1. Assigning IP of the name servers in the DHCP scope options is a hack --
this problem means that name server discovery failed-over five different
methods.  Why can't an authoritative DNS (with the default intallation
options) be found on on a Class-C private network with a single contiguous
subnet (255.255.255.0)?

  2. I can't be lazy and use the same hack to assign an RPC server through
DHCP.  I'm 100% lost on resolving this problem -- can anyone provide some
perspective on it and/or troubleshooting DNS?

You need a DNS server running on Windows 2000 or 2003 SERVER.
IP address for DNS must be set on each PC to be the Server IP address
that runs DNS (can be given via DHCP).
Assign DNS forwarders on the DNS server to resolve Internet Addresses.

However, if you're not running a domain, DNS resolution isn't an issue. 

Win2k and WinXp Pro boxes insist on registering themselves to a DNS
box that understands Active Directory. Most Internet DNS servers can't
handle the AD. So, you must provide that yourself.

I concur will crythias-ga. I recommend you setup a single AD in a
single organization with DNS Server on the Windows 2000 Server. Then,
configure your WinXP and other PCs to log into the AD. Note that you
will need to create a domain in AD, and place this domain suffix info
in your Windows desktops so that their connections map correctly to
the Windows 2000 Server.

If you have non Win clients, you can use LDAP to connect to AD (a bit
more difficult but quite possible). Configure your DHCP scope to use
the internal DNS Server as its primary. Then, have the DNS Server
forwarding to your ISP's external DNS Servers.

This works quite well in my home, even with Windows 2000 Server in NT
4 Domain mixed mode.