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Friday, January 28, 2011

"The RPC server is unavailable" problem demoting a domain controller in an NT domain

When using HyperV for an enterprise development task I needed to rapidly create, promote, and then demote servers. The promotions went fine but I ran into problems doing the demotions -- I kept running into a problem where I got the message claiming that "The RPC server is unavailable." The error message claimed that it couldn't contact another DC in the domain to complete AD replication before it did the demotion, which seemed unlikely since DNS was set up correctly.

I don't know why this solution worked, but ... the way to get this fixed was to go to another DC in the devdomain, bring up the "Active Directory Sites and Servers" admin tool, select the server I was trying to demote, expand the "NTDS" child icon, then right-click on it to get the "Replicate Now" context menu option.

I clicked on that to force a replication then tried the demotion opration again. This time it worked.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I also come across the same issue while migrating DC 2003 to 2012. But I figured it out , this mess was due to DNS and NW comm. So please fix at your end.

-SAndeeP

Unknown said...

Life is all about timing... the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable... attainable. Have the patience, wait it out It's all about timing. See the link below for more info.


#unavailable
www.ufgop.org