As some of you know from the previous blog engine’s database results, J bought a new Dell server and had trouble joining it to the domain Damnednice.com . There were two errors returned while attempting to join:

- A domain controller could not be contacted
- The RPC Server is Unavailable

I had this same problem earlier when trying to same task on a standard Windows XP client. Interestingly, J also noticed that every time he tried this, the computer was successfully added to Active Directory.

Troubleshooting revealed the problem was not related to Firewall, DNS, or DHCP settings - Despite results from several Google searches. Shame on Google.

Ironically, the RPC server was running and available both on the existing Domain Controller and the client server wishing to join the domain. Google returned no useful results, so I tried setting the joiner server to a static IP. Problem solved.

So if you’re getting the above errors when attempting to join a system to a domain, set your system to a static IP.