Re: help understanding this behaviour

The DHCP Service on these "home user" boxes isn't that great. I would not
be too surprised at anything "stupid" that they might do.


--
Phillip Windell
www.wandtv.com

The views expressed, are my own and not those of my employer, or Microsoft,
or anyone else associated with me, including my cats.
-----------------------------------------------------

"SeriousSam" <SeriousSam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:DC4251B4-B7F5-4FEF-BD6A-3E46CB7AB1A3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
A client of mine had a PC that was so full of spyware and garbage that the
easiest solution was to wipe the HDD and restore the OS. So i took it to
my
home workshop and re-installed Windows XP Pro on it. I wanted the machine
to
be ready to go when I plugged it in back at their office so i decided to
use
VPN to rejoin it to their domain, and I ran into something that I don't
understand.

1. I created a VPN connection to their server and connected to it. No
problem.
2. I went through the process of joining the PC to the domain. I would get
to the point where i was asked for credentials that were allowed to join
the
machine, and I would provide this.
3. The PC would try for a moment and then return a message that a domain
controller for the domain could not be contacted.
4. After trying this several times I noticed that the VPN connection would
die almost as soon as I clicked the OK button after entering my admin
credentials.
5. I checked the event viewer and found an event stating "Host at
<mac-address-of-PC-NIC> received NACK from DHCP server at address
10.1.1.5.
The IP was my gateway router at home-office. This made no sense to me
since I
knew that the NIC already had a good IP address and would have no reason
to
obtain a new address.
6. I tried joining the PC to domain again and noticed that the VPN
connection icon changed to the "obtaining IP address icon" as soon as I
would
click the OK button, and DHCP on my router was immediately returning a
NACK
response and breaking the VPN connection.
7. I assigned the PC a static IP on my local subnet and disabled DHCP on
my
router.
8. I restarted, connected to the VPN link and was able to join the machine
to the domain with no problem.

Problem solved, yes, but WHY? I'm sure there was a misconfiguration here
on
my part, but I can't figure out what it is. I have joined PC's to domains
via
VPN before and not seen this. The VPN server runs Windows 2003 SBS, my
router
is just a Linksys BEFW54. It looked like the PPTP adapter was
rebroadcasting
for a new IP and receiving the NACK response from my router because that
NIC
already had an IP address. Can anyone school me here? Thanks!


.