Vat of Knowledge

I ran across the following problem when installing an Exchange front end server on a different subnet than our corporate subnet:

We have installed an Exchange 2003 cluster on our back end, and I’m trying to set up our front end server on a trusted VLAN.  Our Catalyst switch has the routes between subnets, and I’m able to run dcdiag and netdiag successfully from this member server.  However, I’m running into the following as soon as I try to install Exchange:

I posted my question out to a great resource that I use with all my Exchange related issues, http://forums.msexchange.org.  I got the following in response from Exchange_Geek:

Please run
nltest /dsgetsite
and
nltest /dsgetdc: FQDN of your domain

This resulted in:

Status = 1919 0×77f ERROR_NO_SITENAME

DC: \\domaincontroller2.domain.com
Address: \\<ip of DC>
Dom Guid: c08c94df-22d4-49c0-9b53-ffeb78ed5dc5
Dom Name: domain.com
Forest Name: domain.com
Dc Site Name: Default-First-Site-Name
Flags: GC DS LDAP KDC TIMESERV WRITABLE DNS_DC DNS_DOMAIN DNS_FOREST
The command completed successfully

After searching on “Status = 1919 0×77f ERROR_NO_SITENAME”, I came up with a Microsoft article that basically told me that my DNS entries were wrong either on the Exchange server I was working with, or the DC itself.  This was not the case, of course.  Then I ran across this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/259427

The key here, is that I did not have my subnet added to Active Directory Sites and Services, and my new Exchange server was also not part of the “Default First Site”.  Mainly the latter, however.  After adding the subnet, I still received the error, but after adding the server to the site, the error went away, and I was able to successfully install Exchange.  Hope this helps someone else having similar troubles.