Neil McDonald's Dynamics 365 Blog

I’ve been having an issue when trying to add multiple users on the CRM 2011 release candidate. I could add individual users fine, but the multiple users wizard showed the below error after selecting the license type and authentication provider.

I looked in the event viewer and saw this message

Exception information:     Exception type: ActiveDirectoryObjectNotFoundException     Exception message: The specified domain does not exist     or cannot be contacted.

I could add users fine individually, so my domain could definitely be contacted, so why was this error only occuring when trying to load multiple users? I turned on tracing, which displayed this:

Process: w3wp |Organization:38fbda44-2715-e011-8b1e-00151d004a11 |Thread: 4 |Category: Exception |User: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 |Level: Error | SystemLabelDictionaryCacheLoader.LogDetails

The user GUID full of zeros lead me to believe that perhaps my CRM is getting a list of users from AD and is finding one without a GUID which caused an error. I connected SQL up to query Active directory to find out which user it was, but I was getting no further as everything seemed to have a valid GUID.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe the domain that could not be contacted, isn’t the domain I’m logged in to? As far as I was aware, there were no other domains to contact, but the CRM server seems to think otherwise. I decided to load up Wireshark on the CRM server to capture the packets and find out what exactly the CRM server was trying to contact. I got to the stage just before I knew then error would occur in the wizard, then started capturing packets. I hit the Next button in the wizard and then immediately saw this in the Wireshark window: –

It seems that the CRM is trying to contact the domain xtbase.office. Now this domain was removed 3+ years ago, so I had no idea why the CRM would still be finding it. I used ntdsutil to try and clean up whatever was left over from the old domain, but there was nothing to clean up.

I then remembered the options on the screen I could’t get to via the wizard…

Trusted domains! Finally, I ventured onto my PDC and looked in Active Directory Domains and Trusts. Under the properties of my domain, on the trusts tab, there was the problem domain. An outgoing and incoming trust for xtbase.office. I deleted the trusts from the list and tried the Add Multiple Users wizard again. Success at last!

So the main lesson for today is: Read the error message, then read it again!