How to have a member server stick to one specific domain controller?


In case of troubleshooting or temporary issue, you may want to be sure that a given member server always authenticate against one specific domain controller.

For this, you may want to combine two tools:

  1. The “time-to-live” (TTL) value for the validity of the discovered domain controller
  2. The ability to specifically target a given domain controller when checking the secure chanel

The first point is addressed by using the ForceRediscoveryInterval registry key introduced in Windows 2008 (and back ported to Windows 2003 in a hotfix should legacy servers live after july 2015 at your premises). It is documented in detail in the incorrectly titled article KB 939252: The domain controller locator cannot find an appropriate domain controller on a computer that is running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.
The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters\ForceRediscoveryInterval DWORD value should be set to 0xffffffff for (almost) eternity to happen.

The second part is achieved using the regular

Please note that this trick doesn’t allow you to make this setting persist across reboots.

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