Manage Email Signatures centrally from your Desktop - For All Users

nathan.page · Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2009 8:46 pm Post subject:

We had a customer on the phone for about 2 hours with this situation. When the user logged in everything appeared OK, and the machine gave no indication there was a Global Catalog issue.

In our troubleshooting of the issue we looked into the registry and saw first off there was no root context string which should have been a clue probably that the GC server was offline. We inserted the LDAP string into the registry manually and logged the user back on to the workstation. Once completed we then looked at the deployed signatures and saw that the user was only getting the default signature (yet another clue that the GC server was down).

Lastly we tried to create a user and received an error message stating that even though the user would be created, AD could not confirm that it was a unique user account because it basically had no GC Server to check against(the final clue to the mystery of the 3001B error).

If you are getting 3001B errors that state User not logged into a domain, then you run dcdiag to see if there is a GC Server available to process logins. If not then you need to re-boot your GC Server. In most cases this server will simply be your domain controller (but there are instances where you might have your Operations Master Roles(Schema Master, Domain Naming, RID, PDC Emulator, and Infrastructure Master) are delegated to multiple servers within your organization. Doing this lowers the chances of a SPOOF or Single Point of Obvious Failure.

Our support client in this instance had done just that, and even though it appeared that the users were logging into the domain, they were actually just using cached profile credentials, accessing the login script and running it which deleted every signature first. At that point the settings database tried to access the domain using the LDAP string, but nothing was there....hence the 3001B error.
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Sincerely,

Nathan Page
AACo Technology Consulting Group
http://www.aacotechonline.com