Hey Guys,
I have been away for a while but work has finally calmed down enough I can really dive in to trying to fix the AD / DOMAIN CONTROLLER in the office and it's not cooperating.
Important Facts:
1- I took over from another network administrator with zero documentation or notes left behind
2- Very small office (5 users) with barely any infrastructure
3- everyone is running off of wireless, no network drops anywhere (i am actually running a 15ft cable to connect to the cisco switch)
4- Equip: Linksys EA 2700 router (connected to ISP and is handing out DHCP), Cisco SF200-24 port layer 2 switch connected into the router
5- Esxi server and the 2 other servers are connected into the switch
6- Right now I have dhcp reservations for all the servers and PC's from the Linksys router
7- The AD/DC Server 2008 R2 is a VM (no physical server) that was created before I started
Here is the problem:
No matter what I try i cannot connect to the domain - it cannot find the domain controller: the error is: "DNS name does not exist" (RCODE_NAME_ERROR) from any laptop
The AD/DC server is configured with a static IP address 192.168.20.221 that is the same subnet/range as the router (default gateway 192.168.20.10), I set the DNS on the network adapter to 8.8.8.8, 192.168.20.221 ans 127.0.01 and i can ping that ip from any laptop and the server pings the default gateway. I cannot ping the domain name from anywhere and even worse if i do a nslookup from the server itself it cannot find the domain.
Ran a dcdiag on the server: it passed connectivity and all tests passed.
The DNS server is up and the services are running - I went into the server manager and under "DNS" checked the forward lookup zones and i can see the _ldap and _kerberos records which have the proper domain name under _msdcs.mydomain.local. So obviously there is a DNS issue somewhere i just can't spot it. Any help would be great!
Thanks,
Chris T.