The local security authority cannot be contacted

I received the error: “the local security authority cannot be contacted” when trying to RDP into a 2008 server in another domain.

Upon entering the console (in VMWare in this case) I was able to login locally, but was prompted for a password change.

So – in short, the issue could be that your password has expired in whatever security authority the server is using to authenticate. This is obviously more of an issue with NLA type RDP sessions.