This article is intended for Acronis Disaster Recovery users with any type of backup transport: FalconStor, Acronis Backup Advanced, NetApp. The article describes a procedure for permitting the servers activated in Cloud to update their static DNS records with IP addresses assigned during Cloud activation in Test or Production subnets.

Symptoms

A server activated in Acronis Disaster Recovery Service cloud does not update its DNS record. The issue can be identified by the following symptoms:

• server does not reply to ping requests by its Doman Name, however, correctly replies to ping by the IP address assigned in Cloud roduction/Test networks
• nslookup command against the server's Domain Name returns IP address of the original server running in the production network

Cause

It is a usual practice in many companies to use static IP addresses for the servers instead of relying on DHCP service. DNS records for such servers could also be created manually as static records.

However, to ensure normal network connectivity in Acronis Disaster Recovery Cloud all of the activated machines are getting DHCP-assigned addresses. Each Windows machine should perform Dynamic DNS update automatically after receiving a new IP address from DHCP server. In case there is a Static DNS record already present for the particular domain name, Dinamic update is not possible by default. Each DNS record in Windows DNS server is protected with Access Control List (ACL) and the "write" access to a Static record for Computer account is denied.

Solution

To add a Computer account to the ACL:

1. Connect to your Primary Domain Controller in Acronis Cloud using RDP.
2. Open Microsoft DNS manager console and locate the DNS record for required server. Note the static sign in Timestamp column for this record:
   
3. Right-click the record and choose Properties from the drop-down menu.
4.  In the Properties dialog box, switch to the Security tab and click Add:
   
5. Click Object Types...:
   
6. Set a check mark against the Computers object type:
   
7. Find the required computer record and click OK:
   
8. Set a check mark against the Write permission for the newly created ACL entry and click OK:
   
9. For the changes to come in effect in the Test environment, wait for the next snapshot of Cloud domain controller to be created and activate it from this snapshot.
10. Activate the required server and check the results.