Mocity,
I think that it might be of tremendous benefit to you if you take a look at
the following two MSKB Articles that spell out for you how a WIN2000
Professional and a WIN XP Professional workstation locate Domain
Controllers:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=247811
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=314861
There are a couple of things that you need to know.
First thing is that clients making authentication requests are going to
choose the DC with the lowest weight and, in the event of a tie, the higher
priority. Out of the box, WIN2000 Domain Controllers have a weight of 0 and
a priority of 100. This creates a round robin situation where each Domain
Controller would authenticate the same number of logon requests. If you
have two Domain Controllers, then DC01 would respond to approx. 50% of the
authentication requests while DC02 would respond to approx. 50% of the
authentication requests.
If you want DC01 to respond to more authentication requests than DC02 you
would change the priority. You could change the priority on DC01 to 80 and
the priority on DC02 to 20, for example. In this situation DC01 would
respond to 4x as many authentication requests as DC02.
If you want DC01 to respond to all authentication requests - but have DC02
available in the case that DC01 not be available - then you would change the
weight on DC02 to anything higher than 0. For all intent and purposes, a 1
is just as effective as a 101.
You might also want to take a look at the following MSKB Article on how to
set things up in a WIN2000 environment:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=306602
This all is based on the correct and proper setup and configuration of Sites
in WIN2000. You would create a Site for each location that you wanted and
then create Subnets and associate each Subnet with the correct Site. Your
Domain Controllers would need to be located in the correct Site....
What are you trying to accomplish by having a specific computer's
authentication request be handled by a specific Domain Controller in it's
Site? and then by a Domain Controller in another Site?
I am not sure that I understand your logic by wanting this to work for one
specific computer but you are going to test it out with a group of
computers? I would think that you would test things out with one computer
and then move to the group....
You do not mention at all your Sites configuration and the number of Domain
Controllers that you have in each Site or what the links between each Site
are???? Also, have you disabled the KCC and manually created everything or
have you simply created the Site Links and let the KCC ( and it's friend the
ISTG ) do it's thing?
HTH,
Cary
Post by mocityIs there a way to force a specified workstation logon to
a specific domain controller within its own site?
is there a way to force a specified workstation to logon
to a specific domain controller in another site?
I'd like to try changing some settings on my DC's but i'd
rather not do it to all of them at once---i'd rather do
it to one DC and test it out by forcing a group of
workstations to log in to that specific DC and diagnose
any problems.
Thanks.