Backup DC

I know this is an older question and not sure if you have figured this out yet or not but what we did is bind to an alias name set up in DNS.
So when our directory server goes down, we just re-direct the alias in DNS to point to our other directory server.
This would only cause a minor service interruption.


Hope it helps.

Actually, I discovered from a client that the trick is to bind to the domain name rather than a specific server. =

Depending on the versions of the various parts, binding to the domain name may not work out so well. We are on 9.0.0.4 and they just upgraded the domain servers to Win 2008 R2. That combination is not supported by Lawson, but does seem to work. We were, obviously, very concerned about adding in the new servers and getting them to work. That actually went rather smoothly. When we took the old ones out of service, however, SSO would not connect properly. We started having all sorts of errors. Same happened when one went down for an extended maintenance period. GSC recommended that you connect to only one domain server. We decided that the risk of one server being down and having authentication problems was less than the risk of any of 4 servers being down and having authentication problems. Just our opnion.

Binding to the domain name does not provide any active failover. You do need to manage the DNS entries in AD if you take a domain controller out of service, as well as flush DNS on the Lawson server, and stop/start Lawson services. It's just a convenience.

That's not entirely accurate. You DO get failover, IF you understand how AD server roles work.

IF you bind to the domain name ON THE STANDARD LDAP ports (389/636), then you do NOT get failover.

IF you bind to the Global Catalog ports (3268/3269), you not only get failover (so long as a server has the FSMO for the Global Catalog).
An additional advantage is if you have multiple domains, since a GC provides a readonly copy of the ENTIRE AD, you avoid referral/redirection calls, making authenticating much faster.

The downsides are this isn't possible in an AD forest with exactly ONE DC (and you SHOULD NEVER have that issue in ANY organization), and you can't control which DC gets hit, which can be an issue if the DC isn't in the same network segment as the lawson app server, due to latency.

Also, for anyone that knows AD, might consider binding to the pseudo group gc._msdcs.[DnsForestName]. Don't think about it, UNLESS you are willing to disable DNS Caching (which SHOULD be done on ALL Windows-based Lawson servers, or none of this matters...)

Kwane