Joining domains over a WAN

Nutter helps a user join his Los Angeles and New York locations.

A client of mine has two locations. New York has a small business server running in a domain environment with Exchange handling all e-mail. Los Angeles has a small peer-to-peer network but would like to join the domain. Both are connected via a VPN through a fractional T-1 line. Both can ping back and forth, and I can even transfer files. However, when I try to join the LA office to the New York domain I get this error:  “A domain controller for the domain icssci could not be contacted. Ensure that the domain name is typed correctly. If the name is correct, click details for troubleshooting information.”  Any ideas as to what the problem is?

– Via the Internet

I ran into a similar problem at the company I work for. In my case, I had NT 4 at one end and Windows 2000 at the other. First, make sure you don’t have packet filtering in place with the VPN switches you’re using.  Also, make sure you have the latest version of code installed on the VPN switches to eliminate them as the source of the problem.

What I had to do was enable WINS at each end so the two networks could “see” each other.  Once this was done and things settled for a while, I was able to get the domains to talk to each other. In your case, it may be as easy as enabling WINS in New York and then allowing LA to “see” New York by telling the local workstations that the WINS server is the New York server.

The other option is setting up a LMHOSTS file on each of the workstations in LA with the New York information in terms of domain controller, etc.

You can go here for details on how to set up the LMHOSTS file. One of these options should resolve your problem.