ras

Windows Server 2012 Essentials PPP RAS Adapter Registration in DNS

Today, I was looking at an issue where one of my clients at home was reporting that the server was unavailable yet other clients were working perfectly fine. The client in question was a Surface Pro tablet running Windows 8.1. This issue turned out to be the Routing and Remote Access PPP RAS Adapter registering in my Windows Server 2012 Essentials domains’ DNS in addition to my local network adapter. Here’s how to spot the issue and to resolve it.

My server is named BGWSE1 and lives on a staticĀ IP Address of 10.10.10.201 in a 255.255.255.0 /24 subnet.

On the client I pinged the server by IP address to verify that it was indeed online and was able to be returned by the client which it was. I then tried to ping the server by name which returned a response also, but it wasn’t on the first pass that I noticed that the IP Address was different. The IP Address returned was 10.10.10.30. Strange I thought to myself as this is an IP Address inside my DHCP scope which I run on the server using the start address of 10.10.10.10 and an end address of 10.10.10.50.

I logged on to the server and looked in the DNS Management Console and sure enough, there was a second DNS A record registered for the server with the IP Address of 10.10.10.30 but where had this come from as the timestamp on the record was static and not a date and time stamp as seen on most records. I deleted the record as I knew I didn’t want it there and I refreshed the console and no sooner as I had refreshed the console, the record re-appeared.

Running ipconfig from the server, I saw a second network adapter for the PPP RAS connection with, you guessed it, 10.10.10.30 as it’s IP Address.

I Bing search later and the problem now appears to be resolved thanks to a Microsoft Support KB Article which dated back to Windows Server 2003 entitled Name resolution and connectivity issues on a Routing and Remote Access Server that also runs DNS or WINS (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/292822). I have only actually followed step one which is to add the record to the DNS service parameters to instruct the DNS service to only publish a given IP Address for the server. I’ve restarted the DNS and Routing and Remote Access services multiple times since making the change and the secondary DNS A record for my server BGWSE1 has not re-appeared.