Win 2k12, DirectAccess, EC2 - amazon-ec2

Background/objective here is to get clients that VPN in to have access to the LAN they are VPN-ing into. Everything is on EC2.
To get this working, I'm trying to set up direct-access on the Win2k12 box where Remote Access is set-up. Once of the perquisite checks when you launch the "Enabled Direct Access Wizard" is verifying one of the network adapters is configured to have a static IP address (I do not, nor am I aware of a way to make that a reality on EC2!) I can choose to suppress that warning and continue...to a point...eventually I am prompted to "Type the public name of IPv4 used by clients..." prompt pictured below. No value I have tried (host name, fully qualified host name, IP) seems to
work failing with the below errors
host name : "The public name of IPv4 address is invalid. Modify the settings"
fully qualified host name : "An internal adapter with a valid IP address, IPv6 enabled, DNS settings, and a domain profile cannot be located"
IP: "The public name of IPv4 address is invalid. Modify the settings"
I'm thinking this could all be due to the failed pre-requisite, though I'm not 100% sure. Ultimately, I'm beginning to be become unsure if this is possible [by using direct access] or if it is possible to accomplish my goal by using a different approach. Thanks in advance.

I was setting this up on my 2012 server as well and came across the same error. I had to restart the server after verifying I had a static IP, with it's own IP ad the main DNS and the loopback address as the secondary. This was probably because I said that DNS could only respond on that certain IP.

Related

Can not join to active directory

I installed ws2016 server as a domain controller on virtualbox using internal network .
Everything was successfully installed about active directory and i created domain name as 'stark.local'
Also i created another ws2016 on virtualbox using internal network and I want to join new virtual machine to my domain controller.
Can ping dns server(which is my domain controller) and also Firewall off, no anti-virus installed.
However when i try to join dc it gives below error;
what i realized that i can not make nslookup to my dns server ip.
Even if on domain controller can not nslookup its self.
ipconfig of Domain Controller
ipconfig of node1;
I had no hair now and need your help.
Finally solved!
The problem was using internal network. I changed to host-only network and it worked.
AC DC
Using public IP addresses will always get you in trouble, try changing them to something like:
192.168.1.10 & 192.168.1.20
(Please read entire answer before modifying)
Also, i would recommend checking this link on the official microsoft forum. I know it's from windows 7, but i think the main problem you have is with the DNS configuration and it's very well explained there.
I'll summarise the link above here:
#Meinolf Weber's answer
If domain machines contain public DNS servers as 200.88.127.23 and 196.3.81.5 you will always have trouble.
Remove them on ALL domain machines and run ipconfig /flushdns and ipconfig /registerdns and reboot clients and domain member servers and restart the netlogon service on DCs instead reboot.
For internet access please configure the FORWARDERS in the DNS server properties in the DNS management console with the public DNS servers.
Explanation:
You can't join a machine to the domain using public IP because it is trying to locate your domain to the public IP which has not information of the private build domain.
Use only local IP in the clients NIC.
Hope it helps, if not please give more detailed information of the issue as well as the DNS configuration (screenshot or whatever you can).
EDIT 1: also check "time settings" on both machines, i know it might seem silly, but that sometimes gives DNS and DC issues. Check IPv6, could be another probable cause of the issues you're having (Go to the network and sharing center, modify the properties of the NIC and unselect TCP/IPv6).
I'd check first IPv6, that'll save you work if it's only that.
EDIT 2: again, i would recommend changing the IPs (if possible) to another network, as long as the 169.254.x.x is used (assigned) when there's no DHCP server, but as you say they can ping to each other, it may not be necessary the problem.
I can see there's no router in the network but, a Windows Server should be providing DHCP, otherwise things like DNS suffix don't work.
So check that:
- You have the DNS role installed and configured to support AD.
SOLVED on answer below
The explanation i would give for this is that "secure communication" is an often requirement, thing that internal network doesn't provide.

AMAZON ec2 instance unable to connect from office network but works outside

I am unable to connect to amazon ec2 instance (public domain) form office network. It works fine outside the office network.
Looks like something is getting blocked in the network. Not sure how to figure out or which logs need to be checked to find out what exactly is getting blocked.
Error Message:
ec2-54-218-186-23.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com took too long to respond.
Typically, if the connection takes too long to respond, the problem is due to the Security Group assigned to the instance. Check that it is allowing Inbound access from the entire Internet (0.0.0.0/0) on your desired port (Windows RDP port 3389, SSH port 80).
Of course, opening up access to the entire Internet is not good for security, so it is better to limit it to a smaller range of IP addresses, such as your corporate network and your home IP address.
Reason
Security groups enable you to control traffic to your instance, including the kind of traffic that can reach your instance. For example, you can allow computers from only your home network to access your instance using SSH. If your instance is a web server, you can allow all IP addresses to access your instance using HTTP or HTTPS, so that external users can browse the content on your web server.
Before You Start
Decide who requires access to your instance; for example, a single host or a specific network that you trust such as your local computer's public IPv4 address. The security group editor in the Amazon EC2 console can automatically detect the public IPv4 address of your local computer for you. Alternatively, you can use the search phrase "what is my IP address" in an internet browser, or use the following service: Check IP. If you are connecting through an ISP or from behind your firewall without a static IP address, you need to find out the range of IP addresses used by client computers.
Warning
If you use 0.0.0.0/0, you enable all IPv4 addresses to access your instance using SSH. If you use ::/0, you enable all IPv6 address to access your instance. This is acceptable for a short time in a test environment, but it's unsafe for production environments. In production, you authorize only a specific IP address or range of addresses to access your instance.
THE SOLUTION BEGINS HERE
Your default security groups and newly created security groups include default rules that do not enable you to access your instance from the Internet. To enable network access to your instance, you must allow inbound traffic to your instance. To open a port for inbound traffic, add a rule to a security group that you associated with your instance when you launched it.
Adding a Rule for Inbound SSH Traffic to a Linux Instance
In the navigation pane of the Amazon EC2 console, choose Instances. Select your instance and look at the Description tab; Security groups lists the security groups that are associated with the instance. Choose view rules to display a list of the rules that are in effect for the instance.
In the navigation pane, choose Security Groups. Select one of the security groups associated with your instance.
In the details pane, on the Inbound tab, choose Edit. In the dialog, choose Add Rule, and then choose SSH from the Type list.
In the Source field, choose My IP to automatically populate the field with the public IPv4 address of your local computer. Alternatively, choose Custom and specify the public IPv4 address of your computer or network in CIDR notation. For example, if your IPv4 address is 203.0.113.25, specify 203.0.113.25/32 to list this single IPv4 address in CIDR notation. If your company allocates addresses from a range, specify the entire range, such as 203.0.113.0/24.
Choose Save.
You can find detailed solution here

Resolve host name to an ip address

I developed a client/server simulation application. I deployed client and server on two different Windows XP machines. Somehow, the client is not able to send requests to the server.
I tried below options:
Pinged server machine successfully from client using ip-address.
Pinged client machine successfully from server using ip-address.
Checked netstat command line tool from both machines. Server is in LISTENING mode and client is in SYS_SENT mode. But the foreign address it is using to send is host name not the ip address.
Pinged server machine unsuccessfully using host name from client.
Pinged client machine successfully using host name from server.
I feel the problem is when the client is trying to connect to the server using the host name.
Could you please let me know how to force an application to use an ip address instead of a host name? Is there any other way to map the host name to an ip address?
Go to your client machine and type in:
nslookup server.company.com
substituting the real host name of your server for server.company.com, of course.
That should tell you which DNS server your client is using (if any) and what it thinks the problem is with the name.
To force an application to use an IP address, generally you just configure it to use the IP address instead of a host name. If the host name is hard-coded, or the application insists on using a host name in preference to an IP address (as one of your other comments seems to indicate), then you're probably out of luck there.
However, you can change the way that most machine resolve the host names, such as with /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts on UNIXy systems and a local hosts file on Windows-y systems.
Try tracert to resolve the hostname. IE you have Ip address 8.8.8.8 so you would use; tracert 8.8.8.8
You could use a C function getaddrinfo() to get the numerical address - both ipv4 and ipv6.
See the example code here
This is hard to answer without more detail about the network architecture. Some things to investigate are:
Is it possible that client and/or server is behind a NAT device, a firewall, or similar?
Is any of the IP addresses involved a "local" address, like 192.168.x.y or 10.x.y.z?
What are the host names, are they "real" DNS:able names or something more local and/or Windows-specific?
How does the client look up the server? There must be a place in code or config data that holds the host name, simply try using the IP there instead if you want to avoid the lookup.
Windows XP has the Windows Firewall which can interfere with network traffic if not configured properly. You can turn off the Windows Firewall, if you have administrator privileges, by accessing the Windows Firewall applet through the Control Panel. If your application works with the Windows Firewall turned off then the problem is probably due to the settings of the firewall.
We have an application which runs on multiple PCs communicating using UDP/IP and we have been doing experiments so that the application can run on a PC with a user who does not have administrator privileges. In order for our application to communicate between multiple PCs we have had to use an administrator account to modify the Windows Firewall settings.
In our application, one PC is designated as the server and the others are clients in a server/client group and there may be several groups on the same subnet.
The first change was to use the functionality of the Exceptions tab of the Windows Firewall applet to create an exception for the port that we use for communication.
We are using host name lookup so that the clients can locate their assigned server by using the computer name which is composed of a mnemonic prefix with a dash followed by an assigned terminal number (for instance SERVER100-1). This allows several servers with their assigned clients to coexist on the same subnet. The client uses its prefix to generate the computer name for the assigned server and to then use host name lookup to discover the IP address of the assigned server.
What we found is that the host name lookup using the computer name (assigned through the Computer Name tab of the System Properties dialog) would not work unless the server PC's Windows Firewall had the File and Printer Sharing Service port enabled.
So we had to make two changes: (1) setup an exception for the port we used for communication and (2) enable File and Printer Service in the Exceptions tab to allow for the host name lookup.
** EDIT **
You may also find this Microsoft Knowledge Base article on helpful on Windows XP networking.
And see this article on NETBIOS name resolution in Windows.

Is it possible to resolve a hostname from an IP address without DNS?

Assuming you have an IP address and no other information. You're not allowed to use DNS as it may be reporting invalid information. Also assume that the destination machine is running a Microsoft OS and is currently online and booted.
Is there any way to query the machine directly using the IP address (some service/port) to find out what the hostname is of that machine?
Depending on the version of Windows and services enabled on the remote machine, you may be able to query its NetBIOS (WINS) identifier name. That won't give you a domain name, but it might get enough of a name so you can id the machine.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736703(WS.10).aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830578
You can use NetBIOS Name service (UDP port 137)
I think that WINS is just another name / thin wrapper around NetBIOS NS.

Do we have to buy a domain to serve Bugzilla?

I tried putting my IP from whatismyip.com in the urlbase of Bugzilla but it did not work. I wasn't able to create a new account for my team mate, and he wasnt able to access the server by typing the my ip address in his browse. And surely, when I connect again, my IP address will change. Do we have to buy a www address to host Bugzilla?
You can setup a dynamic dns service, for example via http://www.dyndns.com or http://www.no-ip.com or http://freedns.afraid.org to solve the changing ip problem without buying a domain (or buying a domain as well, but it's not a requirement).
But the real problem is that your team mate cannot access the server via the current IP address which points to either a misconfiguration of the webserver (listening only on localhost?), to a firewall in between, or most likely, that port forwarding isn't set up in your router for requests coming to your external IP address to be forwarded to the machine where you have Bugzilla set up. Additionally, you must set the urlbase to your local IP address, not to the external IP address, as blak3r says.
Check http://www.portforward.com for instructions on how to do port forwarding. But don't forget that everything mentioned has to be working:
Web server listening to outside requests: This can be tested from the same internal network via the local network IP address (what you see typing in a command line console ipconfig in Windows and ifconfig in Linux). If you can connect from a different machine on the same network via the local IP address, this is solved.
Firewalls (in router and the webserver machine) accepting connections to the web server port: For firewalls in the web server, the same test as above covers it.
Port forwarding so the router forwards the requests received on the web server port to the web server machine: This gets tested in the same way as firewalls in the router, that is, you must have your friend (or yourself from the house of your friend) try to connect to the dyn dns name set up or to the external IP as reported by whatsmyip.org.
This is all assuming your test mate is not on your same network, if he is, just using the local IP address (shown via ipconfig or ifconfig) instead of the external IP address and making sure the first step is covered (web server listening to outside requests) should be enough and nothing else is needed!
You most likely do not have your port 80 forwarded to your machine which is the reason he cannot connect when using the IP that was returned from whatismyip.com.
Assuming you're on a windows box... do
Start->Run->cmd then type
ipconfig
If your address starts with 192...* or 10...* this is your Local Area Network (LAN) IP. If this is the case, then your isp provided you with a router. Look for a setting called port forwarding or "application setting" which allows you to forward all incoming traffic on your router to a particular IP address. Go into your router's configuration settings and make sure port 80 (and maybe 443 if you're using ssl are forwarded to your local ip).
The other problem you mentioned is you do not have a static IP. This is a common problem and no you do not need to buy an address. There are several sites which can provide you a free dynamic dns host. Try no-ip.org.

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