{"id":712,"date":"2009-02-08T19:26:11","date_gmt":"2009-02-08T17:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.networknet.nl\/apps\/wp\/archives\/712"},"modified":"2012-02-04T20:42:42","modified_gmt":"2012-02-04T19:42:42","slug":"windows-active-directorydc-vm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.networknet.nl\/apps\/wp\/archives\/712","title":{"rendered":"Active Directory: Tombstone Lifetime of 60 days with a virtual machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

My domain controllers didn’t receive any replication updates from their partners. I checked Event Viewer and saw a lot of error messages and warnings.<\/p>\n

The domain controller I was analyzing, run on Windows Server 2008 as a virtual machine.<\/p>\n

EventID 1925, 1435 and 1663 warnings were showed in the Directory Services Event Log. I restarted “Active Directory Domain Services” service and reboot the server. I also reset the computer account password with netdom.exe.<\/p>\n

As this problem was related to Active Directory I run the dcdiag.exe<\/strong> utility.<\/p>\n

DCDiag.exe command-line tool analyzes the state of one or all domain controllers in a forest and reports any problems to assist in troubleshooting. DCDiag.exe consists of a variety of tests that can be run individually or as part of a suite to verify domain controller health.<\/span><\/div>\n

Saved the output to a text file and reviewed all events. At some point I saw my problem..<\/p>\n

\n
Starting test: Replications \r\n\u00a0\u00a0 REPLICATION-RECEIVED LATENCY WARNING \r\n\u00a0\u00a0 NET-DC-03:\u00a0 Current time is 2009-02-08 17:01:25. \r\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 DC=ForestDnsZones,DC=Networknet,DC=nl \r\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last replication received from LABN-MSX-01 at \r\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2008-10-26 15:22:49 \r\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 WARNING:\u00a0 This latency is over the Tombstone Lifetime of 60\u00a0 days!<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This latency is over the Tombstone Lifetime of 60\u00a0 days!<\/strong><\/h3>\n
If you find this\u00a0 “This latency is over the Tombstone Lifetime of 60” warning then there is no other way to resolve this problem without seizing the FSMO roles to another functioning domain controller, and force the dcpromo.exe to remove Active Directory\u00a0 from the system. After the server has been rebooted run meta cleanup<\/strong> of the obsolete records.<\/p>\n
The root cause of the tombstone problem was that the server run as viritual machine and was shutdown for 3 months. This was lab environment where I was doing my development work. In production you may not see this except if a AD site is disconnected for longer time.<\/p>\n
References:<\/h3>\n