# Cannot join PC to Server 2003



## lfcgeorge (Aug 23, 2010)

Hello guys!

I am studying for my Microsoft Exam 70-290 so I decided to use Virtual PC 2007 to install Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and activate it.

The first thing I did was click on Add/Remove Role and I selected 'Typical Configuration for a first server' so that it automatically set up my DNS/Domain/AD all for me.

The thing I want to do now is connect my Windows 7 PC to the domain. When I right click 'My Computer' Click Advanced System Settings, click the Computer Name tab and click on 'Change' then enter my domain name which is 'contoso'. It then asks me for the domain administrators passwordand name, so I enter that, all is fine until it gives an error of the following:

An attempt to resolve the dns name of the domain controller in the domain being joined has failed. Please verify this client is configured to reach a DNS server that can resolve DNS names.

This error comes up everytime.
I added my Windows 7 computer name into Active Directory Users and Computer, under the Compute folder in the CONTOSO.com scope. I also set a manual IP address on my Win7 machine as 192.168.0.10 and set the prefered DNS server to 127.0.0.1 which is my DNS IP address. My servers IP is 192.168.0.1 but I cannot ping that address from my Win7 machine and Incoming echo requests is allowed on my server 2003 console. I have also disabled IPv6.

I'm not sure what else I can do to make this work so any help would be much appreciated. Thanks


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## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

Active Directory depends on DNS, so your Windows 7 machine has to have the server as it's primary DNS server.


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

Your server has to have AD and DNS working properly before you can do anything. 127.0.0.1 is the local host IP address and will not resolve names to IP adresses or any other DNS functionality. Is your server running DNS and AD...it pretty much has to if it is a domain controller.


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