1:00 AM
Paul B
I recently completed a project where I had to upgrade all of the domain controllers on one of the Active Directory domains I manage to Windows Server 2008 and raise the functional level to Windows 2008 as well. In order to do that you can either do in place upgrades on all of the domain controllers, or build new ones and transfer all the FSMO roles to them. We went with the later.
We decided to build all new from scratch because it is always better to go with a clean install than do an in place upgrade, and it also gave us the opportunity to clean up the naming conventions of the old domain controllers. (By that I mean, there wasn’t a naming convention in place.)
The upgrade went pretty smooth, with a couple of exceptions. One, a few Sharepoint web parts had one of the old domain controller’s host names hard coded. To fix that we simply created a CNAME record in DNS to point that host name to one of the new domain controllers. The other problem we had was that all of a sudden their Exchange 2003 server was having problems doing lookups on newly created mailboxes. Oops!
I checked the event logs like any other good administrator and saw the following error:
Could not read the root entry on directory ‘<fqdn of domain controller>'. Cannot access configuration information.
The fix is actually pretty easy if you are seeing that error too. The problem was caused because the Recipient Update Service was looking to one of the domain controllers we replaced. To update the domain controller name for the Recipient Update Service in Microsoft Exchange 2003 do the following:
- Open Exchange System Manager
- Go to Recipients > Recipient Update Services
- Right click on each RUS and select properties
- Under Windows Domain Controller, click Browse and select the name of your new domain controller.
- Click OK, Click Apply Then Click OK again
Wait a few minutes, and check your event viewer again. You should see that error disappear like Roman Polanski when confronted with criminal charges (What? Too soon?)
