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Can't manage multiple AD domains with same Netbios name / different FQDNs

I've currently tried to add a new AD domain to our Patch Manager system to inventory and manage their domain computers. I already had added the WSUS server successfully for this domain and was able to manage Microsoft and 3rd party updates without issue. In order to start managing more with their Windows systems I've installed the PM Automation role on a server in this domain successfully. My issue occurs when attempting to add the new AD to my management group. I am able to go through the Management Group Wizard successfully and add the new AD domain. However, once I finish, the new AD domain I just added is not there. I'm assuming there is some limitation in the database that is causing it not to allow multiple domains to be managed if they have the same NETBIOS name. The new AD domain has a different FQDN than the existing one already setup in the system with the same NETBIOS name.

Is there any way to make this work without renaming one of the AD domains(which may not even be possible since they both have Exchange servers and would require massive amounts of labor that I'm sure the customer will not approve of)?

There are no errors during my attempt to add this additional domain to the existing Management Group.

Louis

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LGarvin

In addition to adding the domain to the Management Group, you will also need to add Credentials to the Credential Rings, so that the Patch Manager console user can enumerate the domain. Most likely the domain is not appearing in the Windows Networking node because there is no authority to query the Domain Controller.

Now... aside from that, there WILL be issues managing two domains that are using the same NETBIOS domain name. At a minimum this will likely require you to always specify domain identies using username@domain.local format rather than DOMAIN\username format, since it will be impossible to distinguish DOMAIN1 from DOMAIN2 using the DOMAIN\username format.

lshunnarah

I was able to specify both credentials when I first attempted to add the second domain because it had a different user name. However when attempting to add the domain to the management group it would never show up since I assume because the NETBIOS domain was the same as an existing domain already in that mgmt group(possibly an issue with the way this data is stored in the db?). I don't think the credentials play a role in this procedure however I still tried adding the credentials using the UPN format like you suggested in which it presented me with a warning and asked me to specify the Pre-Windows 2000 format which I did and it entered the credential properly.

Besides this one issue, all other domains work fine. We have about 24 different domains total and fortunately all but this one have had unique domain names for both formats.

Currently all domains/wsus servers are in one management group and I use one or more automation server per domain.

I use the default credential ring and have one credential per domain added to it.

LGarvin

Yikes! You're right. The NETBIOS names also create a conflict within the Management Group itself.

If you're up for it, a workaround to that would be to install a second Management Role server just to manage the other domain.

There's more information about Management Groups and Management Role Servers in this Product Blog post:

lshunnarah

Good idea and my original plan for all domains, but the way I understand it, adding another management group and assigning a new machine to that group as the mgmt server would cause the data collected for that domain to be stored on that management server. We have custom reports that were written using our local Eminentware db. Since all data for that particular domain would be stored on a a server and db I would have to speak with our developer to see if he could still automate our report generation/distribution process using both databases, securely.

This would work in a less complex way if there was a way to periodically merge that data from the second management servers db into the main one we store all the rest of the data in.

Since I know the built in canned reports are able to combine all the data from the multiple databases spread across the management groups I know it's possible some way or another.

Thank you for the suggestions as they seem to have lead me to some new ideas as to how to tackle this.