DirectAccess stuck at connecting

Question

_{Friday, November 13, 2015 2:10 AM}

I have a Windows 2012 R2 DA setup with Windows 10 client.

All my client work well except one. It's stuck in Connection stage.

If I start the VPN, and disconnect it, it will then connect for maybe 2 minutes then will drop connection and back to connecting.

The VPN is establish with my firewall not with the DA server.

Anyone have an idea why?

All replies (4)

_{Monday, November 16, 2015 7:25 AM}

Hi,

If a DirectAccess client is continually saying "Connecting..." - it is either having a hard time building the DA tunnels, or more commonly DA is actually working in the background just fine, and the probe that tells the NCA (the networking tool you are looking at that says connecting) is just failing. If you can actually access resources when this is happening (indicating DA is actually working), then it's just the NCA probe problem and you should issue a different probe destination inside Step 1 of the DA config wizards.

If DirectAccess is actually not working, then of course that needs to be investigated as to why it's not connecting.

By the way, you can reset a DA connection by restarting the IP Helper service on the client computer. Shorter than having to restart Windows.

Please also install all hotfix for Windows server 2012 R2 in this KB article:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2883952

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_{Tuesday, November 17, 2015 6:08 PM}

Done that and have not change anything.

Is there any reliable diagnostics tools or log that we can have a look at? It's quite a black box to be honest. If it work fine, but if it doesn't it's quite hard to diagnose.

The user is behind a NAT router, is there any known issue with any specific brand or feature like L2TP passthrough that may need to be activate?

Any reason that establishing the VPN then disconnecting, allow the tunnel to get setup and working for a couple of minutes?

_{Thursday, August 4, 2016 11:27 PM}

I have a Windows 2012 R2 DA setup (in Azure Resource Manager) with the Windows 10 client (local).

I also had the "Connecting" symptom (along with PS reporting "Status : Error" & "Substatus : NameResolutionFailure") at the client.  Meanwhile, the Remote Access Dashboard indicated all green/good.  

My solution was provided by DA guru Richard Hicks and was the absence of the **directaccess-WebProbeHost **DNS record.  For more information, search for DirectAccess DNS Records Explained. (I'd post the link but the site won't let me).

Thanks Richard!

_{Wednesday, December 6, 2017 11:43 AM}

Is that compulsory to have both **directaccess-corpConnectivityHost ** and directaccess-WebProbeHost in an Multi-site environment??