A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

Watch out when you enable DNS Scavenging and have a DirectAccess environment

,

So we had recently enabled DNS scavenging for a large environment who also had a DirectAccess server. The next day we were getting help desk calls about remote users not able to connect and those who were in the office unable to use their devices.

One of the cornerstones of DirectAccess is DNS and the Network Location Awareness this provides to the clients. We had to re-create the DNS records for DirectAccess manually on one of their DNS server.

  • directaccess-corpConnectivityHost which includes both A and AAAA records when deployed on IPv4-only networks. Basically the Loopback addresses for both IPv4 and IPv6.
  • directaccess-WebProbeHost this includes only A records and resolves to the IPv4 address assigned to the internal network interface of the DirectAccess server.
  • directaccess-NLS should point to the server hosting the Network Location Service, which should be Highly available.

So when building your DirectAccess infrastructure, always remember to set the DNS entries as Static.

One response to “Watch out when you enable DNS Scavenging and have a DirectAccess environment”

  1. Paul Harrington Avatar
    Paul Harrington

    Perfect! Just what I needed to fix DA after enabling DNS scavenging!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

More Posts

How to reset the Remote Desktop Server Licensing Grace Period on Windows Server 2012 with Remote Desktop Services

So we recently started looking into Terminal Services and RemoteFX to power some of our admin users and move them off to thin clients instead of full blown desktops.  As a trial I begun setting up RDS on one of our Dev machines.  After going through the motions of enabling the Remote Desktop Features and […]

Get-MessageTackingLog cmdlet for Exchange 2010 Returns Cannot process argument transformation on parameter ‘Start’. Cannot convert value to type “System.DateTime” because String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.

Recently, I was conducting some investigative work around mail delivery for a client.  PowerShell cmdlets for Exchange are awesome and give us as administrators some real power in trying to figure out what is wrong.  Some things in PowerShell though don’t take into account the regional language settings of the machine you’re working on.  One […]

SAML SSO for FortiWeb Admin interface

I was recently engaged with a large health-care provider in deploying a set of FortiWeb VMs to protect a number of web applications. Part of this deployment included setting up Single-Sign on for the admin interface using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD). While the process is fairly straightforward it is a little confusing at some […]