DHCP & Surface Dock which has no MAC address pass through / hot desk environment

Question

_{Monday, February 26, 2018 12:52 PM}

Situation:

• Network with DHCP Failover (Windows 2012 R2).
• Clients: Surface Pro x with Surface Dock, Windows 10.

Issue:

The Surface dock has no MAC address pass through. There are workplaces where a Surface dock is installed and the user (and Surface devices) change sometimes within several hours multiple times. As they attach their Surface Pro to the same Surface dock as the user before, the client sends the same dhcp client identifier (MAC address) to the DHCP server as the client before did. Therefore the DHCP Server assigns the same IP to this client as he assigned to the client before.

In DNS ClientA has already registered with this IP, and now ClientB which got the same IP, registers his name with the same IP too. At the end I have multiple hostnames in DNS which are all pointing to the same IP.

DNS records are not deleted in this case as no criteria is hit (no lease expiration on DHCP side, no scavenging on dns side as all the DNS entries are just a few hours old (timestamp).

So what options I have to resolve this?

There is a poorely documented Registry Key which can be set: DhcPClientIdentifier
But I think this is not really a good solution, manual, needs administrative effort also I don't really know if it's working as Network Adapter GUID may be another when attaching once to another Surface dock?

Another Option could be to disallow clients to register themselves and let DHCP do the job which may lead to other issues.

What is the best way to resolve such an issue?

I have already opened a case with Microsoft, but as the quality there is very poor at the moment there was no outcome, basically I got links from them how Dell, HP, Lenovo is resolving the issue with MAC address pass through. So my free interpretation of the Support reply is, don't use Surface Pro / Surface Dock in an environment with DHCP and better take a device from someone else.

Thanks in advance for and helpful Inputs.

Regards

Philippe

All replies (3)

_{Tuesday, February 27, 2018 10:12 AM}

Hi,
Based on the complexity and the specific situation, we need do more researches. If we have any updates or any thoughts about this issue, we will keep you posted as soon as possible. Your kind understanding is appreciated. If you have further information during this period, you could post it on the forum, which help us understand and analyze this issue comprehensively.
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding and patience.
Best Regards,

Frank

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_{Thursday, March 5, 2020 2:05 PM}

Hey, we've been waiting 18 months now for your research :)

Thanks.

_{Friday, March 6, 2020 1:21 PM}

Hey,

We are experiencing the same.

Devices seem to keep the mac address in their memory of the previous docking station, resulting in a possibility of 2 clients sharing 1 mac address which results in a L2 connectivity problem on our switches.

To solve this we unplug both devices from the network and reconnect them, so they are forced to re-initiate the ethernet interface and picks up the right mac address.

We can use mac address passthrough on all devices, but doing so breaks the application which keeps track of where everyone is sitting (Flexwhere workspace management), so this is not a solution.

Hope there will be a solution for this situation!