JVH Consulting's Blog

After an Essential Server migration (from 2012R2 to 2016 Essentials) I was moving my client machines to add them to the Essentials Dashboard on the new server using the Connector application. I had already removed the Essentials role from the old server – meaning it was no longer a domain controller either.

I found when running the connector the above error message kept showing up. I rebooted the server, disabled the firewall, cleaned out DNS entries of old DC/Essentials server and tried a host of other tricks found on the web – nothing worked.

Finally I found a site that suggested the workstations in the domain needed to have their secure channel reset with the new domain controller – huh – who ‘da thought that would be the case since they were authenticating and users were able to logon to their workstations just fine… That’s so weird.

To stop the above error message, all I had to do was run: nltest /sc_reset:<domain.local> (pointing to internal FQDN name of my domain). Ran this in Admin cmd prompt (or powershell)… after doing so running the connector worked!! Success.. Wished I had the link where I found this solution to provide recognition here. This also explains why the solution of disjoining workstations to domain and rejoining would work but that is a bit drastic when above command does the trick. (Another solution was to remove and re-add Essentials Experience to the server – also drastic and not necessary!).

Another thing I did was push out via my RMM the registry key to tell each system to skip domain join since they were already part of the domain. The command is the following:

reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\ClientDeployment” /v SkipDomainJoin /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Thanks for reading and hope above solution helps you!