When I boot the system, it hangs on "Preparing Network Connections" for about 5 minutes. I have read endless posts about this behaviour, but no one seems to have a solution. This particular system is a Windows Server 2003 DC with AD and DNS installed. It is the only DNS server on the domain. I suspect the problem is that AD is waiting for DNS, which cant contact AD - endless loop! I have an error 4015 followed by 3 error 4004's in the event log.

I have already tried unticking the "Store this zone in Active Directory" but this did not help.

Thanks a lot.

Rob

Run DCDiag and NetDiag. What do they say?

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it takes about 5min for my server to
but everything works and no errors in any logs so i don't know if it should be faster

i only reboot maybe 1 time per month
so it is no big deal for me.

If there's no errors in netdiag or DCDiag, I would guess it's a load problem. How many DC's do you have? How many clients?

"I have an error 4015 followed by 3 error 4004's in the event log."

Which log (system, security, or app?), and what is the source of each?

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I dont know whether these events are significant but they appear in the DNS Server section. My network has 2 DC's, with 3 clients (i know - i probably shouldn't even have a domain but I'm trying to learn about them as I would like to persue this kind of thing as a career when I am older). Anyway, the servers are turned off every night to save electricity, so it's quite a problem as it takes about 10 minutes before I can log on.

Thanks a lot

Rob

Sorry, but on further inspection I can see that the errors actually occured 3 days ago, so they may not be relevant to this problem at all.

Rob

This looks relevant to your DNS errors, although obviously the hotfix isn't.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;267855

"I suspect the problem is that AD is waiting for DNS, which cant contact AD - endless loop!"

Doubtful. AD is obviously working because you can still log in. It's just taking awhile.

Run this and save the results file. PM me here to figure out a way to transfer the file...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cebf3c7c-7ca5-408f-88b7-f9c79b7306c0&displaylang=en

MPSRPT_DirSvc.EXE

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Just to make it clear, the system does actually start up after about 5 minutes, and everything works fine. It's just the long wait that I am concerned about.

Man, what kind of hardware do you have?
It takes 4 to 5 min for a box with a 1.8 GHz to boot with a win2k, and only 2 min for a dual Xeon at 3GHz.
From what you write it is perfectly normal.

I'm running a 550Mhz PIII with 192mb of ram. I was surprised it even worked, but my other server (450Mhz!) starts in half the time if the first server is up (due to dns i guess).

hey we have just been having this issue too,
2000 server, box is our ad pdc, found a fix that seams to work, put the pdc's name as a static host in the hosts file.
eg 192.168.2.6 XXXpdc
seams to have fixed ours, al the pages i went to seamed to say a dns issue, some suggested changing the ip of the first dns to 127.0.0.1, but this is a touch more elegant :D

So, seeing as my PDC is called "srv1" (inventive I know), and it's IP address is 192.168.0.9, I should add
192.168.0.9 srv1
into the hosts file? I can actually see this working - but do I need to add it to the PDC's hosts file only, or the other DC's as well?

Thanks very much

Rob

robg.. have you tryed the tip from beardedgeek?? becouse i have the same issue
that you have.. i will try as soon i gets home..

btw. i have dual PIII 550 and 640Mb ram
but i don't think this problem has so much to do with the hardware..

Yes I have added "192.168.0.9 srv1" into the hosts file, but it didn't seem to work. I agree, I don't think this is a hardware issue as ihave a 450mhz server, and that boots in half the time! I believe this is something to do with DNS, as that is pretty much the only difference between the two servers. Personally, I would have thought that adding a record as such into the hosts file would work, but obviously not. I will try adding srv2 into the hosts file as well, see what happens.

Rob

Nope, no luck. Well, if anyone has any other suggestions, then let them be heard!

Thanks for all your help

Rob