DSfW: An Active Directory Domain Controller (AD DC) for the domain could not be contacted

  • 7015391
  • 18-Jul-2014
  • 18-Jul-2014

Environment

Novell Open Enterprise Server OES11.2 (OES 11 SP2) 
Domain Services for Windows
DSFW

Situation

Fail to join workstation to DSfW domain
Workstation returns error "An Active Directory Domain Controller (AD DC) for the domain "dsfw.lan" could not be contacted."

/var/log/messages shows
"Jul 18 10:38:35 dsfw1 nmbd[1950]: process_master_browser_announce: Cannot find workgroup DSFWon subnet UNICAST_SUBNET"

Resolution

The message points to netbios and the wins.dat file
"Jul 18 10:38:35 dsfw1 nmbd[1950]: process_master_browser_announce: Cannot find workgroup DSFWon subnet UNICAST_SUBNET"

A quick way to deal with this is to stop nmb, smb, and winbind (or bring down the DSfW services with xadcntrl stop)
Then delete the /var/lib/samba/wins.dat and start the services up again.
rm /var/lib/samba/wins.dat
xadcntrl start

View the wins.dat with the strings command and look for the netbios name for the domain, in this case it is DSFW.
strings /var/lib/samba/wins.dat

To help with wins resolution, configure one DC to be a wins server (TID 7012934).


2014-July-18: Rance Burker - Created TID