Flaviamichael wroteWork around an issue with VPN clients and split DNS:
A couple of years ago I had some good discussions with different people, including a guy from Microsoft Networking Support, about how the name resolution for VPN clients was supposed to work. Everybody seems to agree that when the VPN client connects, we expect that the RRAS adapter will automatically be placed on the top of the adapter list. As you probably know, the adapter order plays an important role in the DNS resolving process because the DNS servers associated with the adapter that has the highest binding order in the adapter list are tried first.
However, in practice we didn't see that behavior consistently, even if we manually placed the RRAS adapter to the top of the connections list in the Advanced Settings dialog box of the Network and Dial-up Connections tool. Because it didn't seem to break anything in the configuration I work with, at most I could see a small slow down in name resolving, I didn't bother to fix that problem.
When I started to publish some internal services and set up a well designed split DNS infrastructure to support it, I immediately got some complaints from some VPN users that some internal services were no longer reachable. It was not difficult to determine that the failing internal services were those defined in the external DNS server too. So, that old VPN name resolving issue was cropping up again and this time it was really breaking things. What was interesting was that only some VPN users were affected although they all use the same configuration, except the type of sharing device connecting their workstation to the cable/dsl modem. Also, take note that a different ISP is used for the VPN clients and the central connection to the ISA server.
So wait, how exactly did you fix the problem? Or are you saying that you are currently experiencing it? Is the problem actually due to a DNS misconfiguration issue? We've never had any problems before this - and no one else is replying to this thread anymore it seems, so I'm interested in gleaming as much information from you as possible to figure out how to overcome this.
