A client of ours uses the Cybernet iONE all in one PCs for customer internet stations at several of their locations. One oddity of these machines is that they ship with dual Gigabit onboard NICs. On these internet stations we typically use just one and disable the other NIC. While building out a particular machine, I needed to install several pieces of software that we deploy via Group Policy Software Installation. The problem is that any time I would attempt to deploy the software via Group Policy, it would fail and I would see event ID 1054 in the event logs… “Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for the computer network. (The specified domain either does not exist or exist or could not be contacted). Group Policy processing aborted. Data: (unavailable)”. Everything else was working fine. The machine was a member of the domain, I could ping the domain controller that DHCP had assigned to the machine, I could resolve internal and external addresses, gpresult showed that the PC was successfully linked to the software installation OU, etc. [more]
After conducting some research on this error and on these machines, it turns out the problem was that the onboard Broadcom gigabit NIC was taking too long to auto-negotiate its link speed, creating a “race condition” between the TCP/IP protocol and the NIC driver when they try and register with the MS Nework Driver Interface Specification. The local Userenv process (what actually performs GP’s instructions) would attempt to install the software before the NIC was fully available, thereby causing it to fail when it would attempt to run the assigned MSI over the network. Here’s how to rig the race so that the NIS driver always wins the “race”. There is a MS hotfix available for this along with a more detailed problem description at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840669. After installing this hotfix you must add the DWORD registry entry GpNetworkStartTimeoutPolicyValue in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and set the value of that DWORD entry to the number of seconds you would like the OS to delay processing Group Policy Startup scripts.