Question

Weird Password/New account issue in Exchange

Active Directory, Exchange, Password

Ok when we create a new account for someone and have to where they have to change their password upon log on they get an error after they try to put in new password saying "the "domain" is not available".

But if we just have the user put in the password at our stations as we create the account they can log on just fine and everything is all good.

So basically for new accounts that try to log on can't after they have to try and reset their password.

We checked DNS, AD and all that other good stuff. So any ideas at this point would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

You may experience difficulty with new accounts not being able to log on until AD replication takes place when the account is created in a different site for example. To my knowledge, this would not result in a domain not available error though. This seems more like an issue with the computer not being able to find a domain controller or global catalog to log the user on. In Windows 2000 Server, a global catalog server is required when a user logs on for the first time to verify universal group memberships. This dependency is removed in Windows Server 2003 with universal group membership caching on domain controllers but this features is not enabled by default.

The reason that new users are able to log on after first logging on and changing their password at one of your workstations is because some changes such as password lockout and password changes are replicated immediately in AD.