After a power issue at a client, the mail server wasn’t working

  • Unable to login from RDP – access is denied as domain admin
  • Couldn’t open any network resources from server
  • All kinds of kerberos, DNS, DHCP, etc… errors – basically anything that is trying to authenticate against the Active Directoy

Here is what worked for me:

  1. On the server that isn’t playing well with others, set the Kerberos Key Distribution Center service startup to “manual”
  2. Reboot the computer. This will make it get its Kerberos Keys from the good server
  3. Then reset the machine password by running this from a command prompt:
    netdom resetpwd /server:server_name /userd:domain_name\administrator /passwordd:administrator_password
  4. Set Kerberos Key Distribution Center service startup back to “automatic” and restart computer
  5. Celebrate!

Thanks to Stan Gobien for the blog post, and here are two KB articles that pertain to the issue: KB2090913 & KB288167