Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Demote 2003 Domain Controller: NETLOGON Timeout

As you may know, I occasionally copy information here which I feel needs better exposure on the web. This is just such a post.

I recently tried to demote a server 2003 domain controller (using dcpromo), and hit the following error message:

The operation failed because:

Failed to configure the service NETLOGON as requested

"The wait operation timed out"
This is a particularly useless message because the actual problem has nothing to do with netlogon.

I corrected this problem by modifying the TCP/IP settings to point DNS at the remaining domain controller (e.g. remove 127.0.0.1 or any other IP which points to the machine being demoted).

4 comments:

Unknown said...

that worked!!!!! thanks, super awesome when someone encounters a problem before you, lol. thanks again

boma23 said...

yep - thanks for that - I'm just trying to finish a migration of a really flaky SBS2003 box to SBS2011, and have already had some strange errors, leaving me wondering if there was some strange permissions issues going on between new and old servers. The DNS was pointing at itself, (as opposed to loopback), bu changing to new SBS box worked! Thanks for MS translation service.

Lingshan said...

it works!

Michael said...

I had to disable DHCP server to correct this issue on a box. Thanks for the lead.