“The RPC server is unavailable” when joining to domain

Everytime you try to connect to the domain (from workgroup) it would say “The RPC server is unavailable”

First thoughts directly point to DNS… which was some of the problem. The Router was dishing out DHCP rather than Windows Server 2003 SBS.

Why?? I asked?? Was there any advantage of this? not really… If this is setup within a small company then people will be server based users anyway so probably unable to operate without it, even if the web/DHCP was available on the router.

The client tries to resolve the internal domain.local using the router on the external DNS. That’s not going to work! not unless you bodge it and manually add the SBS Servers DNS into the DHCP the router dishes out so the clients can resolve it. Not the best fix, but it works.

Better still add DHCP on the SBS2003!

Getting this one fixed I could now do the following:

  1. Ping the server
  2. Ping the FQDN of the server (fixed the issue in the first link)

But I was still experiencing the annoying “The RPC server is unavailable” why was this??

Finally finding the problem!! “NORTON INTERNET SECURITY” those three words made into a dirty acronym “NIS”

Disabling the firewall and BAMM! The client could be connected to the domain and fully working.

 

 

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