Never underestimate the power of the basics

I recently was contacted by a partner who was having trouble with a migration. They had been working all night because they ran into trouble and had to start over. In the second pass, they could not get Active Directory to sync between the two servers. That’s when they called me in.

After getting a status report about the error, the first place I had them look was the ipconfig on both servers. As soon as they looked at the output from one of the servers, they knew what the problem was: the server was pointing to a non-existent system for DNS. There was no way that box could sync anything since it could not get valid DNS entries for AD.

The moral of the story: always check the basics. Even if you KNOW that the settings are what you are expecting, confirm them when you hit a snag.