Recently I have upgraded all bar one of my Windows servers to server 2008. This included upgrading a Windows 2003 Active Directory controller. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that everything went perfectly well with absolutely no initial issues. However after a couple of days one very odd issue began rearing its head.
My Windows 2008 DNS server (PDC upgraded from 2003) occasionally decided that it can no longer resolve .uk domains. It doesn’t matter if it is .co.uk, ac.uk or whatever .uk it just flat out refuses to resolve them unless I restart the service.
A second Windows 2008 server that I installed DNS on as a secondary server has the exact same issue. After a couple of days it will just stop resolving .uk domains!
After plenty of head scratching and searching I finally discovered this article on technet.
It requires a bit of registry editing but what puzzles me is that if the problem has been fairly well known for almost a year (that technet article is dates 29th January 2009) why is the fix still a registry hack?
I have a disk that is about to fail on my Active Directory domain controller. The system event viewer is rapidly being filled with bad block errors and it does indeed look like that I will have to replace the offending disk. That is no major problem, however I only have one domain controller so I’ve just finished configuring another Windows 2003 server here as a secondary controller for when I take the other one off line. As soon as replication is complete I will promote it to become the primary and take the other off-line.
There are a few annoyances though. My PDC is also my DNS server and primary file and print server too. It is configured with two disks, one 160GB and the other 40GB. It is the 40GB disk that is on its way out and that is also the system disk. Luckily it only has one share which I’m currently moving the data off of as I type. The DNS is going to throw me slightly I think so it looks like I might have to replicate that over as well. Ah well, rarely a dull moment.
Update – Using Norton Ghost, I have successfully cloned the dying disk to a new 160GB one. Only took an hour 
