Question : Joining Mac OS X Version 10.6.4 to windows server 2008's Active Directory

hi everybody,

Actually i am not an expert in either mac or windows but i really want to learn about computers. Right now I am doing a small project for that i bought windows server 2008 Standard edition, a desktop computer and mac book pro. I am using vmware fusion for the windows clients. Everything was working fine as i have created a domain and installed vista clients and joined them to domain with no problem. But now when i am trying to join mac to my domain it is giving me the following error message.

An invalid Domain and Forest combination was specified. You should enter a fully qualified DNS name for the domain and forest.

i have also attached my error and Directory Utility screen. I dont know what i am doing wrong may be i am doing some foolish mistake as I just started using mac since last week. I will really appreciate if somebody will solve my problem. Thanks in advance

Attachments:

Screen-shot-2010-08-21-at-11.12..png (2.3 MB)  (File Type Details) 

Screen shot of my error message

Answer : Joining Mac OS X Version 10.6.4 to windows server 2008's Active Directory

I support Active Directory professionally, and have a couple Macs at home -- never really tried to put them together before, but I walked through your steps and joined my domain with no problems (10.6.4 OSX).

Here are some things to check:

Assuming you have DNS and AD configured and working on your server -- does your domain resolve to the IP address of your server?  (on the Mac if you ping naushad.com does it reply with the correct address for your 2008 server?)  

Note as well that the 2008 server should point to its own IP address for DNS in its network settings.

Does the Mac have it's primary DNS server set to the address of your 2008/AD computer?  Not sure if it matters, but on my Mac I have the AD domain name entered as a secondary search domain in Network system preference.

Any problem connecting to a file share on the 2008 box from the mac?  (you should be able to do this regardless of whether it is joined to the domain).

I suspect you should be double checking your DNS on server and client, it sounds like that it the likely problem.