RN214 Active Directory problems when the Domain Controller reboots

[HonestAly]

My Domain Controller will periodically reboot after pulling down Windows updates.  When that happens the Readynas 214 will no longer allow AD authenticated users to log in.  I have to reboot the RN214 in order for it to allow AD clients to use mapped drives.

What I don't understand is in the AD setup you have to specify a DC for the RN214 to work with.

Yet my 2nd DC is running DNS.  Why doesn't the RN214 perform an nslookup for  _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.<DOMAIN NAME>

and then try the DCs that come back until it can connect to one?  The whole point of AD was that all the DCs are equivalent, and that one should take over for the others when they fail or are simply rebooting for windows updates.

[kohdee]

We use DNS to find your DCs... so if you have only 1 DNS server on DC2 and DC2 goes down, we will not be able to resolve the Domain... Set the NAS DNS to all available DNS servers for this to take place.

We require the NTP server to be set (which we set automatically), the NetBIOS name from the domain (example: NETGEAR), the Realm name (NETGEAR.COM), and a user account with domain join privileges to join the network.

ReadyNAS (via Samba) will randomly select the best DC for usage. If it selects DC1 and operates, and then DC1 goes down, it will jump to DC2 and stay there until DC2 goes down, at which point it will attempt to find a new one. 

Fields like Directory Server Address are not recommended because they will prevent your ReadyNAS from hopping to the next available DC (essentially hard-coding your NAS to only talk to 1 DC). Don't use this.

[HonestAly]

Except this isn't working.

The readynas has both of my DNS servers for my two DC's configured in it.

the FQDN domain is cryptoknight.home

the Netbios is CRYPTOKNIGHT0

I fill those in, plus the administrator account CRYPTOKNIGHT0\administrator   or just administrator in case it uses the NETBIOS name with the admin account name and the password.

And I get back an error message when I hit apply

Failed to disable/enable user

the ReadyNAS has registered itself in my AD, as it shows up with a computer account in the Computers OU, but I have no clue what user it's trying to enable/disable.

[Adam86]

Glad I found this post.

I have the same issue with 3x ReadyNAS units in three seperate locations. 2x RN102 and 1x RN104, all running version 6.9.5

Each unit is configured to the Domain Controller in that physical location.  If that domain controller is rebooted, the ReadyNAS unit will forever prompt for credentials until it is rebooted.  It will not select another domain controller.

I've even tried changing the domain controller that the ReadyNAS points to, to just my FQDN of my domain and this just does the same.

At one time this used to work perfectly fine, but this functionality no longer works correctly in the recent months.

[pg-sat]

I have recently encountered this issue whilst testing a readynas 2304 as a backup destination.  The test environment currently contains only one DC which is rebooted evey night.  All backups fail until the ReadyNAS is rebooted.  I have even tried restarting the samba service but this does not help.  The live environment will have two DCs but if the ReadyNAS is sensitive to the loss of the controller it originally authenticates against, then this solution is not going to be feasible.

Since the NAS was not previously used in a domain environment I cannot comment as to whether this is due to recent updates.

Has this issue been raised as a bug?

Current Firware Level:  6.9.5

[HonestAly]

It's not a bug once I had the second dc up and removed the hardcoding to point at a specific dc and rebooted a couple times and likely swore a few, it magically works and will use any dc to handle authentication.

[pg-sat]

Thanks for the update.  I have configured the NAS to auto reboot each evening (cron job) to allow us to continue testing (so far so good).  I will update this thread when we introduce the second DC but this may be sometime away.