I created a new SfB “Site” in the greiginsydney Lab during the week for some DR testing. For this I built two new servers, both running Server 2016. One was to be a Front-End, with the other an Edge.

The Front-End joined the domain OK and was easily managed from my desktop, but the Edge just wouldn’t play. Try as I might I wasn’t able to RDP to it. Networking was fine – they could see each other, with pings succeeding in both directions. I disabled the Windows Firewall on both: still no dice. I even toggled the Remote Management settings on the Edge, and rebooted for good measure. Nup.

I tried the modern-day equivalent of a Telnet connection:

PS W:\> Test-NetConnection sfb2015edge2.blah.local -Port 3389 -InformationLevel Quiet
WARNING: TCP connect to (192.168.19.89 : 3389) failed
False
PS W:\>

Not even tinkering with the NetConnectionProfile would coerce it to accept my RDP connection.

I was on the verge of blowing it away and restarting when I tried a variation on that theme. I blew the NICs away with this:

netcfg –d

… then rebooted, where-upon the NICs returned and I was able to reinstate the same networking settings from before – except this time all was a source of joy.

I don’t know if this is going to be a reproducible problem, but if you encounter the same with a new VM, consider the above before you “scorch” it and start again.

– G.