Can not Contact Domain Controller

[Owen Rees]

--On 22 December 2005 14:08 -0800 Mike Blanco wrote:

> So I have tried to do this:
>
> mkgroup -l -d > /etc/group
> mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd
> administrator@bgserver1 ~
> $ mkpasswd -u "mblanco" -d "bgchemical.com" >
> /etc/passwd
> mkpasswd (731): [2453] Could not find domain
> controller for this domain.
>
> I can never contact my domain controller, which is on
> the same machine as the cygwin.

The prompt suggests that you are logged in as 'administrator', not as 
'mblanco' so you will need to set up the account 'administrator' properly 
in cygwin if you want things to work in that context.

As Holger asked, are you sure that "bgchemical.com" is your windows domain 
name? Are you perhaps confusing Internet domains (as in DNS, FQDN and names 
like 'example.com') with Windows Domains (as in PDCs, BDCs and these days 
Active Directory). The terminology is somewhat confusing, especially since 
the two kinds of domain can be linked if the Windows Domain Administrator 
knows what they are doing (see Gary's response to your question). Even if 
the Windows Domain and DNS have been set up so that they work properly 
together, my quick experiment suggests that you do not use a FQDN for the 
'-d' parameter to mkpasswd.

On the subject of domain controllers, if you can log in as administrator on 
a machine that is running a Windows Domain Controller then I would hope 
that you know far more about being Windows Domain Administrator than I 
remember from the Windows NT Admin course I did nearly 10 years ago. If you 
meant that you are running a DNS server then that is an entirely different 
thing.

Two things to do to get some basic information before going any further:

At a Windows Command Prompt type

 whoami

This should respond with

 DOMAIN\user

For values of DOMAIN and user that match what you use to log in to Windows. 
Then from a cygwin shell type

 echo -u "$USERNAME" -d "$USERDOMAIN"

the USERNAME and USERDOMAIN environment variables should be set to the 
values reported by whoami (Note that there is also a whoami command 
provided by cygwin - it is not the same thing as the Windows command).

If the values matched, in a cygwin shell type

 mkpasswd -u "$USERNAME" -d "$USERDOMAIN"

This should respond with the line you need to put in your /etc/passwd to 
make things work for the user you are logged in as.

One final point. In the extract quoted above you used '> /etc/passwd' for 
the second call of mkpasswd but this will replace the previous contents of 
/etc/passwd deleting all the local account data. You should use '>> 
/etc/passwd' to append the extra line.

-- 
Owen Rees
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK



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