Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

Friend of mine tried to promote Windows Server 2012 into Windows Server 2003 SBS environment. He had installed Windows Server 2012 Server. He also installed role Active Directory Domain Services. When he tried to promote new installed Windows Server 2012 into existing SBS domain he received following error:

Error was generated while Windows Server 2012 tried to do preparation of AD forest. So I have tried to do it using command line:

So same error (Adprep could not retrieve data from the server through Windows Managment Instrumentation WMI). Some problem with WMI on existing domain controller. I have tried to rebuild WMI from scratch using this article. No luck. Message saying “Access is denied” was not true, because account used to run setup.exe /forestprep was Enterprise, Domain and Schema Admin. When I read this article I found out that DCOM has to be enabled and accessible when doing domain controller promotion. So I looked into configuration of old domain controller following way:

Run command dcomcnfg.exe

Browse down to Component Services -> Computers -> My Computer. Right click and select Properties. I found that DCOM was disabled:

So I enabled it with following settings:

…and I was able to promote Windows Server 2012 as a new domain controller. No more access or WMI errors.

This was really hard one to find out 🙂

One customer has two physical locations. Here is following IP setting for both locations:

Location 1 – IP range 10.0.0.0/23 and wpad server is 10.0.0.22

Location 2 – IP range 10.0.2.0/24 and wpad server is 10.0.2.22

When you create two same A records in DNS you get two IP addresses on DNS query. Order of DNS record is changing, because we have Round Robin enabled on our DNS servers. This is default behaviour.  Here is some testing with nslookup:

Same results were in both locations. What we wanted to achieve was that we need DNS servers to return IP address 10.0.0.22 in location Location 1 on first place and IP address 10.0.2.22 in location Location 2 on first place. To make it work we need to look on feature called netmask ordering on DNS servers. You can read more here.

Let’s transfer IP addresses in each location into binary:

10.0.0.0/23

00001010.00000000.00000000.00000000 — 00001010.00000000.00000001.11111111

10.0.2.0/24

00001010.00000000.00000010.00000000 — 00001010.00000000.00000010.11111111

Networks in both locations are same to 22 bit from begging. First different bit in 23rd. So we need to change netmask ordering on DNS server to use first 23 bits to compare when returning results to client. It means our netmask ordering has to be set to:

00000000.00000000.00000001.11111111 — 0x000001FF

We need to set it on all DNS server and restart DNS service:

Once we do this on server we can see following result in Location 1:

and following result in Location 2:

So now it’s all set and ready to go.

Have a great day,