Workstation has lost the trust relationship with the domain

Question

Ok here is a tuffy.

I know that to rebuild the trust relationship you have to logon to the workstation as a local administrator and disjoin, then rejoin the domain.

My question is, is there a way to rebuild the trust relationship remotely? Does anyone have a script, utility, application or command that will rebuild a lost trust relationship?

Answer 1

Frequently (for us) the source of the problem behind "trust relationship" issues is that the machine account AD password is out of sync (the machine believes it to be one thing, the domain controller(s) believe it to be something else) and the machine is unable to authenticate to AD.

There's no need to disjoin first if the only thing that needs to change is the password. This can be fixed relatively easily by invoking the JoinDomainOrWorkGroup method of the Win32_ComputerSystem class. The catch is that the process must be run from the machine you wish to (re)join to the domain (otherwise, the machine account password won't get updated).

It can be done easily enough in PowerShell. Something like this (adapted from this TechNet contribution ) would suffice:

$CS = Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem 
$CS.JoinDomainOrWorkgroup($Domain,'','',$null,33)

That will join the machine to the domain using an existing machine account. You may have to specify a user and password, depending on how you get shell access to the remote machine.

Running it remotely does not have a one-size-fits-all solution. I usually use PSExec to get remote shell access and invoke the PowerShell command (using -EncodedCommand to negate the need for quoting).