Symptoms

We have an old DC which our IT department wants to shut down. However, when it is shut down, some users get affected and cannot login to any K2 SmartForms.

Our structure is that we have a PARENT domain and then a couple of child domains, such as CHILD. The DC we are trying to shut down is a CHILD DC, however, also PARENT users get affected by this shutdown. We have many load balanced DCs so the shutdown of one should not bring down the entire K2.

 

Diagnoses

Using the "nltest" command, we can see that no server where K2 is running appears to be using the shutdown DC, and that DC is one of many in the list.

We tried previously suggested approaches such as changing from LDAP to GC and running the "nltest" commands but none of the steps were effective. We have even modified the DC Locator and removed the priority of the DC in question to lowest before shutting it down. This did not help and we had to power it up again so users could login to K2.

 

Resolution

We have found a consistent workaround for this issue. After shutting down the DC in question, when users get stuck logging in, we modify the K2 Runtime site in IIS and switch the Authentication mode to Forms and then back to Windows, then the users get another working DC.