Today I solved an issue with an ActiveDirectory Domain Controller. It started when my workstation could not find a domain controller (DC). The DC's event log was showing errors with the event ID 5781:
Dynamic registration or deletion of one or more DNS records associated with DNS
domain 'mm.local.' failed. These records are used by other computers
to locate this server as a domain controller (if the specified domain is an
Active Directory domain) or as an LDAP server (if the specified domain is an
application partition).The problem was caused by a misconfiguration of the DC's network adapter. The upstream DNS servers were being used instead of the DC itself. This caused meant that the various ActiveDirectory DNS entries were being sought on the ISP's DNS servers where, of course, they would not be found.
The correction was to configure the network adapter to use the DC itself for DNS and to change the DC's DNS configuration to have forwarder entries for the upstream servers.
