Out of my league again!

[jmhcs]

I have been asked to track down a VPN problem although I know little about it. It should be simple (key is should be).

The remote site can see the server (W2003 Server) but cannot open application programs. It appears some mapping was lost as when opening the application at the remote site, files cannot be found. This happened when the server was rebooted. Everything worked until then.

Does rebooting the server destroy some mapping??? I will continue to research but any help would be appreciated. Thanks much.

[Sterling_Aug]

It would lose some drive mappings if they were not set as persistant!

[jmhcs]

I can see the VPN is connected. However, when trying to remap, I cannot see the server from the client computer even though I have logged in. Confusing.

[jmhcs]

More information. The server uses a domain name "name.company.name.com"
The client computer only use a worgroup. This, I assume, will not allow the connect, correct???

[Sterling_Aug]

Correct. You can't connect to a domain drive unless you log on to the domian as a valid user account.

[jmhcs]

So far so good. As I mentioned, the client computer appears to be connected via VPN to the server. I have acquired the domain name in the format "name1.name2.com" However, when I insert the domain name into the client computer I get the message "A domain controller for the domain name1.name2.com could not be contacted"

I assume I am doing something incorrect. I have not changed the computer name.

[Sterling_Aug]

Has the client computer ever been joined to the domain before? If not, it needs to be added by the network admins before it will authenticate.

[jmhcs]

It has but as mentioned before, once the server was rebooted, the connnection was lost. The problem is someone has change some settings in the client computer and eliminated the domain name. I assume the computer name is also not supped to be changed in order to authenticate. Is this correct?

Once the connection is made, we can remap the drives and all should be fine. (I think) I am doing most of this work via GoToMyPc.com as the client is 80 mile away and the server 10.

[Gokudan]

Hi there!

You should not change the PC name because the primary dc will recognize it as a different PC. It looks someone put the pc out of the domain.

You should tell the network admins to join the pc again into the domain. for that you need to erase the workgroup name and put the domain in the domain textbox, in many cases you should only put the domain without the .com (i.e. hotmail), in other cases you should put the name plus the .com (i.e. hotmail.com), then windows will ask for the domain administrator user & password in order to join the pc to the domain.

I'm not an expert but you should also look if under TCP/IP conf. your primary DNS is equal to your primary dc controller, i might be wrong with this. Please correct me if i am wrong.


A pc cannot be authenticated if the pc hasn't join a domain, but you can authenticate via a local admin user on the server i guess....not too sure with this either.


Att.
Gokudan