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I recently had to rebuild a domain controller [DC02] due to AD database being corrupted and not repairable. Additionally, this server had a degraded RAID [RAID 1] due to a hard drive failure. I had to reinstall the OS on DC02 because DC01 had to seize the roles residing on DC02. I also cleaned metadata on DC01. Long story short....Everything worked fine after promoting DC02 to be a domain controller. Here is where the strange behavior began. Once the computer rebooted, it would replicate and connect normally with the DC01, but after around 10 min later it would disconnect from the network and it was gone. You could not ping it or anything. I ran all the dcdiag tests, repadmin tests, etc....nothing pointed me to the cause.

After more than a week of troubleshooting, I found the culprit to be Dell Openmanage [OM] which would throw an event [at the 10 min mark] for the degraded RAID and disconnect the server from the network. When I uninstalled Dell OM everything worked fine without interruption. I tried to edit the [alert] settings in the Openmanage utility but that did not seem to change the behavior...the server would always disconnect after 10 min. You could see the event being triggered right before the server got disconnected from the network.

Has anyone seen this before? Is there a work around that would allow me to use OM while the RAID is degraded? The RAID hard drive will eventually be replaced but because I work on a government contractor project, it may take weeks or even months before I get a replacement HD and I would like the extra layer of redundancy even if it is one drive on DC02.

I would like to use Openmanage because it is convenient to monitor the server hardware stats, logs, and alerts. Although I have found the cause I wanted to post this in case anyone runs into this and can't figure it out. I had a very hard time searching online for clues or a solution for my problem with no success. Most of the info I found revolved around DNS issues, etc.

I am now checking group policy to see if there is something that is triggering this behavior [note: This server was originally setup by someone else which, you guessed it, is no longer available.] [UPDATE: Could not find anything in Group Policy that seems to trigger this].

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  • UPDATE 2: I tried installing an older version of Open Manage (6.5) on DC02, but this also disconnected DC02. Interesting thing is that another server had a critical event. But it was a file server. It had a RAID battery failure. It got disconnected from network. When I uninstalled Dell Open Manage 8.2. it connected fine and stayed connected. I then decided to install the older version of OM (6.5)...and this time it did not disconnect. Later I installed OM 8.2 but I this time did a custom installation where I excluded WMI. This worked too on the file server and the file server stayed connected.
    – MarkL
    Dec 10, 2015 at 19:11
  • UPDATE 3: I tried this on the DC02 but it didn't work. My conclusion so far is that there must be a Group Policy that is triggering this more so on the domain controller than on the file server (GPO for domain controllers) but I still can't identify the policy. In any case this is what I think it is at this point. Maybe a policy disabling a port or TCP/IP.
    – MarkL
    Dec 11, 2015 at 17:15

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