Never having seen this error before, I went to Spiceworks to see what fellow IT Admins have done to fix the problem. I'm still at a loss as to why it's happening, but it appears to be linked to updates that were allowed on the server. I've checked with everyone who has admin access to the server but nobody will fess up to setting the server to auto-update.
I'm having a problem implementing the fixes I have seen because the previous Admin, and my current boss, implemented a policy of "zero local admin logins" across the entire network. I've never worked with a network where this policy was in place. I know the security concerns, but everywhere else I've worked seemed to recognize the danger of not having any local admin access, period.
We noticed the problem yesterday morning. Having never seen it before, and after a little research realizing the problems it could present in our environment, I called in our outside IT contractor with an ASAP request to find and fix the issue. This was at 8AM. They emailed me at 2:30PM with an "I should get to this sometime today" response. At this point none of the Domain Admins could log into the server, but shared resources were showing up fine. I found the instructions listed on various previous postings to Spiceworks, and more that a little peeved that a response had not come until more than 6 hours later, told the contractor that I would try to deal with the problem.
It's the next day now. Backups failed because BackupExec could not access the volumes on the affected server. By now I was worried and checked the DAG - it's in a fail state with warnings about failure to arbitrate for the file shares on this server. I was planning on waiting till after hours tonight, disconnecting the server from the Domain and trying to log in then, but am unsure where that will leave me if it fails.
Anyone out there had a similar experience, in a "no local admin access" environment?