server 2008: cannot verify server belongs to same farm, in the Terminal Services forum on BrianMadden.com

Hey guys,

I'm playing with a Server 2008 TS farm and I'm testing the load balancing features. I've done the following:

Setup a domain controller with DNS and WINS.
Setup 2 TS - no licensing configured
Setup a TS Gateway

Created a domain group for TS users and added it to the local Remote Desktop Users
Created a domain group for TS servers

Created a bunch of testusers and added them to the domain TS users group.

I created DNS entries for all servers, including the required addresses for load balancing (farm name with IP addresses from the terminal servers).

I added the terminal server domain group to the TS_RAP

There are no restrictions set in TS_RAP or TS_CAP

Basically the farm works and and different sessions with the testusers are neatly spread over the farm.

However, when I try to connect to a desktop (even with an admin account) to a specific server I get this message:

(Dialog name) Remote Desktop Connection
Unable to connect to terminal server
The terminal server farm server1.blabla.local that you are trying to connect to is redirecting you to server server2.blabla.local. Remote desktop cannot verify that this server belongs to the same server farm. This can occur if there is a server on your network with the same name as the server farm.

The server belongs to the same farm. When I open Terminal Services Manager and Import from TS Broker I see both servers. All the testuser terminal sessions are made to FARM01.blabla.local and both terminal servers are used. Also, there is no server with name FARM01.

In short I have no idea what could be wrong and if someone does (or has an idea) don't hold back for the sake of the greater good ;-)

Thx.

It's a bit late of a response, but did you ever get this fixed? I'm having the same problem with RC1. Thx.

Hello,
To solve this problem, you will need to ensure that you have an AD host entry which matches the farm name for each server.  Then, you will need to connect to the name of the farm instead of individual hosts.  If you need to connect to specific, individual hosts for administration then you can still use the /admin or /console switch depending on your version of the terminal services client.

For example:
Farm Name: myfarm
Servers: ts-server1 (1.1.1.1), ts-server2 (1.1.1.2)
Host Entries:  myfarm -> 1.1.1.1  AND myfarm -> 1.1.1.2
^ This enables DNS round-robin, but additional load balancing is enabled by the session broker.  This does seem more simplified than Citrix's approach.

Apparently Microsoft designed it this way, which does seem awkward since you can't just use the host name - if you do, you get this error because with the session broker enabled it thinks that users only connect to the farm name instead of the individual hosts.  Depending on how you look at it, this could be considered a bug.

In my case when I created my TS it had a DHCP address which was later changed to a static IP. The DNS record was still using the DHCP pointer. I deleted the DHCP A record for the TS server in DNS and created a new A record (static) which cleared up the prob. Not super genius, but fixed the problem. Good luck.