Although Windows Server 2003 has been with us a while I can across this issue recently. This only because most of the 2003 domain controller installations I had seen were 32bit. But recently I found a domain that had a mixture of 32bit and 64bit domain controllers.

You run netdiag on your Windows 2003 64bit domain controller and get many failures like the ones bellow:

DNS test . . . . . . . . . . . . . : Failed
[FATAL] Could not open file C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\netlogon.dns for reading.
[FATAL] No DNS servers have the DNS records for this DC registered.

Redir and Browser test . . . . . . : Failed
List of NetBt transports currently bound to the Redir
(more…)