The World According to Mitch

From the files of “What the F@rk?!”

Here’s a little gotcha that I’ve been wrestling with all afternoon.  I hope this post can save some of you the frustration (exacerbated by jetlag) that I have been experiencing.

I am configuring a bunch of virtual machines as domain controllers for the company I am consulting for in Japan.  Things are going really smooth on the project, but we wanted to spin up half a dozen DCs for the new environment, so I figured I’d just spend a few minutes on it.  Then I had to configure the IP Addresses… something I have done thousands of times, both in Server Core and the GUI.  I have never encountered THIS before.

Server 1: Done.

Server 2: Done

Server 3: NO

Server 4: Done

…and so on.  I went back to Server 3 figuring there was a bit of a glitch, and sure enough, it had an APIPA (Automatically Provided IP Address) assigned.

I loaded up the sconfig menu, and set the IP Address by hand.  The weirdest thing happened… it replaced my IPv6 address with the Class A address I assigned, and left the APIPA address.

I went down to the command line… netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”Ethernet” static 10.x.y.z…  and it still gave me an APIPA address.

I was getting frustrated… something was simply not going right.  And then it occurred to me… someone else was playing on my network.  Sure enough, he had already assigned that address.  Instead of giving me a warning, it simply wouldn’t duplicate an address that already existed.

Now if I had already implemented my monitoring solution, this would never have happened!

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