Problems Registering Plug-Ins after a Domain Controller Change

Posted by Kara O'Brien on October 9, 2009  |  Comments (1)

While deploying a code update to a customer last week, we ran into timeout and SQL errors when trying to register a couple plug-ins. We've worked with this client before and never had problems registering our plug-ins, but since our last project the client had changed their domain controller.

After running a trace of the registration process, our team tracked the issue to the domain controller change, based on the following errors:

Exception in FindResultInDC: The server is not operational.

CrmSoapExtension detected CrmException:
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server was unable to process request. ---> System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

MessageProcessor fail to process message 'UnregisterSolution' for 'none'.

Exception: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
   at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection)

The cause of these errors is related to properly demoting the old domain controller. The domain controller was taken offline, but there were still records in Active Directory and DNS that routed requests to the old controller.

Following are the steps that resolved the issue for our customer:

1. Added a String value in the registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM called PreferredDc.
2. Entered the NetBios Name of the target domain controller.
3. Restarted the CRM server.

The customer was able to register the plug-ins successfully after making this fix. Note the registry key was included as a manual update in an earlier rollup and should alleviate some potential Active Directory issues. For more information, see this knowledge base article.