Outdated Entry in DNS Cache when connecting to VCHB name with Remote Desktop

[jrh910]

We are unable to use Remote Desktop to connect to the virtual name of one of our vCenter Heartbeat instances.  When we connect we get a message that says "The connection cannot be completed because the remote computer that was reached is not the one you specified.  This could be caused by an outdated entry in the DNS cache.  Try using the IP address of the computer instead of the name.  We are able to connect by IP address.

Googling for this error comes up with ideas like checking for time sync (it's good) and disabling the security checks for RDC (we can't - company policy).  Using nslookup all of the forward and reverses to the two server instances and the virtual name look good.  The other three VCHB instances in our environment work just fine as well, but we can't find the difference between those and this problematic one.

Have any of you run into something like this before?  Any ideas?

Thanks!

[djciaro]

Hi,

I saw this once before (not involving heartbeat) and it was due to a hostname that was incorrectly spelt. DNS entry was correct, I could connect with IP address but not by name and after some checking I found that the host name was incorrect: SRVEXCH001 was named SRVEXCH01.

Perhaps you have the same problem?

Regards

Ciarán

[hawkeye95 · Accepted solution]

We ran into this same exact problem. It happened only on one of our VCHB instances, our handful of other instances did not have this problem. After much poking around, we noticed that the problem VCHB virtual/public name had a Computer Object entry in AD, while (most of) the others did not. We wondered if this was somehow related to the problem. We checked with VMware support, and were eventually told that it would be OK to delete the AD Computer Object for the virtual\public name. We deleted the AD object, waited for about an hour, and (somewhat to our surprise) this actually fixed the problem--we were able to RDC to the virtual/public name without any trouble.

[jrh910]

That is exactly what we had to do as well.  We removed the VCHB public name from AD and our problems immediately cleared up.  Thanks!