Hi all,
I wanted to add VPN access on our 2008 R2 server yesterday, went through the process and left the box 'Enable security on the selected interface by setting up static filters' ticked and chose vpn & dial up. Once installed I got booted out of remote desktop and could not log back in.
I went to the server and found the server rebooted but as soon as it got to the logon screen it then said stopping services and shutting down and the server just carried on in this loop for the rest of the day.
When I attended the server this morning it allowed me to logon thankfully but found logged on as the administrator I had no internet access. Strange thing was everybody else still had internet even when the server was looping. All MacBooks that just use dhcp were fine but class computers are bound to active directory and these would not work. I tried to open active directory and just got a message saying 'The server is not operational' so I tried to open Group Policy and got a similar message, I managed to get so far and noticed all my active directory settings were gone also were all the goo's as iff they had been wiped.
What I did find out from another forum kind of solved my problem (will put contents of other forum at bottom of message) was leaving the "Enable security on the selected interface by setting up static filters' ticked knocks out the domain controller completely and only allows the server to accept vpn connections, problem solved me thought so booted into safe mode with networking to find you can't start server manager console in safe mode so booted back into normal mode and removed routing and remote access from server manager. I learnt that although i removed this it doesn't reset the settings so I had to enable it again in server manager and find my way through to the ipv4 settings and delete all inbound and outbound filters - this worked and all was back to normal.
A few hours later I was copying a file to the shared folder for staff and got an error message that connection was dropped so tried to remote access into server and couldn't so i went to the server to find it was in it's rebooting loop again so I have left this overnight. I imagine when I get there in the morning it will probably let me log in again so I can check once again.
Just wondering if anybody else had this issue and is there some service that enables the settings again once a remote connection is attempted although i have removed all filters and removed the service from server management.
I have attached some images and below is the response that temporary cured my problem.
"4th July 2011, 10:27Re: Lost Connectivity and Active Directory after installing/uninstalling NPS
I reinstalled the NPAS role with the RRAS role service on the domain controller this weekend. After enabling the RRAS service network connectivity was again lost.
This time, however, I knew what the problem was. During the initial setup, when configuring RRAS as a VPN server there is an option to 'Enable security on the selected interface by setting up static filters'. I had originally letf this checked as I did not understand that the option would drop all traffic except VPN traffic.
The problem is that uninstalling and reinstalling NPAS does nothing to reset this - it picks up the old settings. You are not prompted to set this up again.
I manually added the ports required by a domain controller to the inbound and outbound filters but although connectivity was restored it was incredibly slow.
In the end I removed all the filters. The VPN works fine and access to the domain controller is fine.
If anyone else encounters this issue and they have mistakenly enabled the static filters, cutting off their DC from the network, they can remove the inbound and outbound filters via: Server Manager>Network Policy and Access Services>IPV4>General. Right-click Local Area Connection and choose Properties."
