Customer was going to create a custom SharePoint property to import info from Active Directory but when they tried to setup the Directory portion they had no connections or attributes to select from.  And saw this message

The selection of directory service properties is disabled because the portal is in an untrusted domain or no directory service import is configured yet.

This is in relation to SharePoint 2007 only.

We resolved it by doing the following

  1. Run the following query against the Shared Services DB

select cast (ExtraConfiguration as xml) from dataservicelist

  1. Review the XML and insure that the DC/GC are close enough (Ask your Directory Admin), change it to a hard coded DC if they recommend you change it thru Central Admin.
  2. Also insure that the Search Base property is populated within the XML.

Some general rules to follow

  1. Your default acccess account needs to be in the same domain as your servers.
  2. Needs read access in Active Directory.
  3. SharePoint and Directory Servers need to be in close proximity for things to work.