Project Report 1/24/07

10 days to go. All was going well and then a couple of things didn't go as planned and we had to pull back and regroup a little. Doing all of this with limited manpower and resources is really tough. I'm learning lots but it's by trial and error.

Most everything is in place now. We're ironing out a couple of things and down to the mundane tasks for the most part. Soon we will actually start using parts of the new infrastructure in production. Hopefully that will flush out any bugs before the full roll out on 2/3.

I've got one thing that I'm struggling with. It's an ongoing issue that I was hoping would be solved when I replaced my circuits and routers, but it's still around. Here are the details. If anyone has any thoughts please contact me.

Windows 2003 Domain
13 Sites
Each site has a 2003 domain controller with DNS; WINS
All PC's are XP SP2 running Office 2003
Everything is fully patched.
DNS and WINS have been verified as working properly and replicating properly.

Both of these happen only from remote sites.
If I try to access an intranet site via a web browser I can't connect until I ping the IP address.
If I try to access Exchange via Outlook 2003 I have to ping the exchange server by name.

I've posted on several support boards for Microsoft, checked other sites, asked people who are far smarter than I am and have not found the answer yet.

I posted this on the Security Catalyst site yesterday and have gotten a couple of ideas that I'll try today, but just in case they don't lead anywhere I'm open to other ideas.