Since there are no other partners to replicate, I thought this must definitionly be a warning condition and not a failure condition. Searching for the error message I discovered there's content freshness protection in DFSR and the default value is 60 days like it says in the event log. So I set the MaxOfflineTimeInDays to 458, restarted the DFSR service, and suddenly the second DC came online, and everyone lived happily ever after.
i void warranties
we can't afford a production environment
March 18, 2021
DC not replicating and DFSR Error 4012
Since there are no other partners to replicate, I thought this must definitionly be a warning condition and not a failure condition. Searching for the error message I discovered there's content freshness protection in DFSR and the default value is 60 days like it says in the event log. So I set the MaxOfflineTimeInDays to 458, restarted the DFSR service, and suddenly the second DC came online, and everyone lived happily ever after.
October 19, 2020
Join Windows XP to Windows Server 2019 domain
Unfortunately, I still have Windows XP clients, and I couldn't figure out how to join them to the Windows Server 2019 domain. The error was a simple "An internal error occurred." with nothing in the event logs. I thought the error could be related to SMB1, but it wasn't. I also thought it could be because it's simply not supported, but from Google searches it appears to be possible. It also didn't seem to be related to the domain functional level.
After months and months of hair pulling, I figured it out thanks to a seemingly unrelated blog post. The post talks about problems joining 2008 R2 domains. I had no issues with 2008 R2 since before the upgrade that was what we were using. But installing KB969442 instantly allowed me to join the XP systems to the 2019 domain (functional level is 2016 of course). Funnily enough the post was from nine years ago to the day. The blog looks abandoned like mine but I left a message there thanking the owner.
Now I can continue to use unsupported OS's.
October 16, 2020
Your connection isn't private
September 30, 2020
Windows update install now
Turns out there's a really simple solution to all this. PDQ Deploy has built-in packages for Windows Updates. Applying the Windows Update package seemingly does nothing, but at the next reboot, the pending updates get installed automatically without user intervention, then users simply need to choose the update option next time they shutdown or restart. I looked in the PDQ Deploy package and all it does is stop the Windows Update service, install the latest servicing stack update, install the cumulative update, then restart the Windows Update service. Magic!