With a new SBS 2011 server a customer ordered from Dell, I was trying to connect some Windows Vista Business and Windows 7 Professional clients to it, and I keep getting errors. So, I mustered up all my experience to try to troubleshoot some reasons.
- Checked the time. The server was set to MST time zone while all the clients were in PST. Moved the server TZ, no change. Time is within 1 minute of the clients
- Can I ping the server? Absolutely, by DNS Name and by IP Address
- Can the server ping back? Yup
- Are the DNS services running? Yes. Just a simple DNS server, the one Windows automatically configures for you (Domain name is company.local)
After this, I kept getting confused... I then re-tried going to http://connect, but I kept getting a 404 error. When going through the Network ID wizard, it says it can't find my Computer account. So, just to try something, I create the computer names in the Active Directory, and set up each user to manage their own workstation. It gets to the part about not having an account, so I type in an Admin username/password, or even the user's server U/P. Now, it's just a blank error when trying to join:
Error joining domain *domain*.local. The error message is as follows:
And that's the end of the error. No error number or nothing. I tried restarting the server and the workstations, but this is the furthest I get.
So my basic question is, what other troubleshooting can I do to connect Windows Vista or 7 to a SBS2011 server?
UPDATE The client is getting a new MODEM ONLY from the ISP, and will update on Tuesday