[Samba] Unable to manage dns (ERR_DNS_ERROR_DS_UNAVAILABLE)

[Peter Beck]

On 06/15/2015 08:48 PM, Rowland Penny wrote:
> Are you sure anything is missing ?
Hi Rowland,

no, absolutely not sure ;-)
>
> the sam.ldb file does contain everything, but you cannot see
> everything normally, what ever you do, *do not* edit the files in the
> sam.ldb.d directory.
>

I did not intend to change anything inside these files, was just
wondering, if they shouldn't be created.

Now I moved a little bit further and set up an Server 2008R2 domain
controller for testing and then added a Samba 4 machine as dc to that
domain. This server is running on 2008R2 level and everything -
including dns replication - seems to work just fine from scratch.
The files under .../sam.ldb.d are not created here btw, but dns seems to
work fine.

As far as I could read from another thread [1] are the dns partitions
under 2008 different stored than in earlier versions. Maybe that is the
reason I always had so much trouble to completely ....

quote from that thread:

>The older versions of window server (2003 and older) created the DNS
>containers under CN=System in the domain partition, whereas the newer
>windows server (2008+) creates separate application partitions for
>DNS. DNS RPC server uses DNS partitions to store the DNS zone
>information

it's a bit too early for me to tell if it's finally working with
2008R2... but if that would work there was finally a workaround to
completely remove windows domain controllers (by upgrading first to a
2008 dc, remove the 2003 dc and then finally replace the 2008 dc with
Samba). Replacing a Windows environment completely with Samba is
something that never really worked for me. Usually I've setup the
complete directory from scratch with Samba 4 which is perfectly working
for multiple customers.

But now, if I try do demote the Windows server there is a message
complaining about the DomainDnsZones partition: "The specified domain
either does not exist or could not be contacted". But maybe it just
needs some time for replication, I'll try do demote the 2008 server
tomorrow again..

@buhorojo:
I already switched back to internal dns on that environment for further
testing, but thanks for the hint!

Thanks and Regards
Peter


[1]
http://samba.2283325.n4.nabble.com/Querying-DNS-info-samba4-tp4562214p4586794.html