I'm trying to join a computer in Portland, OR, to a Windows 2003 domain located in San Francisco, via Internet.
The Portland users have just moved to a new office. This configuration worked before from the old office.
After troubleshooting I discovered that the San Francisco firewall had to be manually configured to allow incoming traffic from the new office's WAN IP address. (This was the setting for the old office.)
After making that change I can now ping the server by FQDN.
EX:
serverSF.domainname.local
I have experimented with adding static entries in the HOSTS file. This has allowed me to also ping the server by NetBios Name, but still can't join domain.
The server points to its own address for DNS and I have configured the remote client DNS with the server's IP address. I can access the Internet from the client with this setting.
I have turned off the McAfee firewall on the remote client.
WINS is not enabled on the server.
I have searched the AD very carefully and examined a user's configurations which logged onto the domain successfully from the old remote office. There does not seem to be any AD Group that the user must belong to.
There's no VPN involved. The VPN function on the firewall is not enabled at all and lists zero running VPNs.
I have tried changing the name of the computer. Also, originally this computer was joined to the domain from the old remote office. I disjoined it (which went successfully with no error messages) and switched it to WORKGROUP and rebooted. I then attempted to rejoin the domain, which gave me the error message supplied above. I get a similar message if I try to map a drive to the server.
Originally this all started when one of the users brought the computer to the new location and go the following error trying to login ...
"The system cannot log you on now because the domain DOMAINNAME is not available."
I am (figuratively) pulling my hair at this point and would really appreciate some help. Thanks!
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