Creating Windows 2003 Trusts: The VMWare connection

We've been testing our software for Citrix compatibility lately and wanted to try out some Domain Trust situations to make sure that we either worked, not work and schedule a new feature, or could document a known issue.

Creating trusts between Windows 2003 domains is usually pretty easy.

1. Start up MMC
2. Add the Active Directory Domains & Trusts snap-in
3. Select your domain, right click and select "properties"
4. Click on the "Trusts" tab
5. Click "New Trust" and follow the wizard to create your trust.

This time however, I was having problems. I was creating the trust between a VMWare hosted domain, let's call it P, and a MS Virtual Server hosted domain, let's call it O. When creating the trust, I was getting the error "Local Security Authority is unable to obtain an RPC connection to the domain controller". I verified that DNS was working, RPC services were running on both domain controllers of domain P and O. So what the heck?

Enter Citrix Tools Shared Folders. It appears that if you have Citrix Tools installed with the Shared Folders option, it interferes with the trust creation. The fix is a simple as removing the option from the Citrix Tools install and then creating the trust.

1. Open Add and Remove Programs
2. Select Citrix Tools and click Modify
3. Mark Shared Folders to be removed and complete the wizard.
4. Create your domain trust

Now we haven't been using the Shared Folders option in Citrix Tools so we haven't added it back in, I suppose that you could re-add it after having created the trust and it'll probably just work. If you know for sure please chime in!