Rejoin a Windows Server to Domain without rebooting the Server

Windows Server Administrator has been rebooting Windows Servers all his life :P, either to troubleshoot ongoing issues or to complete the patching process or there could be several other reasons. During the server build process itself we need to restart the machine after joining the server to the Windows Domain.

In this post, I want to highlight an issue we basically come across where the authentication handshake with the Domain fails and users are unable to access the resources on the server using their Domain Accounts. The security relationship with the domain is broken, disallowing authentication of the server on the network. In this case, the administrator tries to check the network connectivity between the server and the Authenticating Domain Controller. In some cases, we need to re-join the server to the domain followed by a Server Reboot.

We can try running the below Powershell command on a Windows Server 2008 or higher OS machine to repair the secure channel between the server and Domain Controller. You would need to login to the server using the Local Account.

Test-ComputerSecureChannel –credential domainname\domainadminaccount –Repair