Hello, New to the board and new to Server 2008 enviroment. At work we have a Netware 6.5 server that does DHCP and DNS. I just setup a new Server 2008 SP2 Standard Domain Controller. I have some workstations that I need to join to the newly created domain, but when I try to do this I get an error: The error was: "DNS name does not exist." (error code 0x0000232B RCODE_NAME_ERROR) However, if I hardset the Domain Controller IP in the client TCP/IP and try to join the domain it prompts for the password. Is there something I need to do on the Domain Controller or Novell so I don't have to hard set the IP on all the clients? Thanks in advance for your help.

Normally you will either need to manually set the SRV records for the AD DS domain on an existing DNS server or change the clients (or DHCP server) to use the domain controller as the preferred DNS server. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816587 and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc759550(WS.10).aspx#w2k3tr_addns_how_kiua if you need to register the SRV records with an existing non-Windows DNS server. -- Mike Burr

If you clients are pointing to your Netware DNS servers, those DNS servers do not have any AD SRV data (as Mike described). If those Netware DNS servers do NOT have the AD domain name stored as a zone, you could simply have those Netware DNS servers forward or conditionally forward (if Netware supports that) to the DNS server that is hosting the AD zone. Therefore, when your clients point to the Netware DNS servers, the Netware DNS servers will get the answer from the Microsoft AD/DNS server and return that info back to the client. If you design will end up that all of your clients will join the domain, you are better off having your Windows Clients point to your AD/DNS servers. Within the AD/DNS servers, you can create conditiional forwarders for those specific zones stored on the Netware DNS servers. Without specific information about which zones are stored where, its going to be hard to give you very specific instructions. Visit: anITKB.com, an IT Knowledge Base.