At my work at school I have taken care of a great deal of the server related big problems. Things like why doesn't x run or why can't y connect. A lot of my time (when I get to do preventitive work on servers) is spent chasing down little problems. Tonights was why wouldn't our main file server properly register in DNS. This has been a problem in the back of my head for a while, it would pop up now and then when NetBIOS wouldn't work for some reason. It became a bigger issue for me becuase Vista (at least in its default config) doesn't do NetBIOS. This is great, but it meant I couldn't connect to our main file server since it wasn't registering in DNS.
Tonight as I sit here all out of whack sleep wise I decided to figure out why. It turns out that somehow the the default DNS domain didn't get set properly when I joined the AD domain. This meant the server was trying to regiset just server rather than server.site.org in DNS. This of course fails. I removed and rejoined the server to the domain and all is well now.
This problem has existed for over a year, but it was never big enough for me to sit and work on. This is where I am trying to get to at work. Finding the little stuff that may at some point be a big problem. A great deal of it is clearly marked as errors or warning in the Application or System log, just have to look and research. I just wonder how many of these little problems compound to be a hidden big problem.
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