Sbs2008 best way to connect remote sites

daniep3

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Nov 15, 2012
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Hi all, I have inherited a sbs 2008 network where they have a SBS2008 server and Server2008 running as a terminal sever at the main office and they have 2 satellite offices. These offices all connect through router to router vpn tunnels. The main site is on 10.0.0 and dhcp is done by the sbs. Satellite site a is on 10.0.10 and dhcp is done by the vpn router and Satellite site b is on 10.0.5 and dhcp is also done by the vpn router. All client computers can run rdp to access shares / programs etc on the two servers but when trying to push out group policy, antivirus updates or even using remote control through the SBS2008 server it is hit or miss. DHCP records on the SBS server do not seem to update correctly, manually changing the ip address in DNS records results in warnings that the PTR record cannot be created.

So I am wondering if the configuration they currently have setup is correct. What might be stopping some but not all computers from updating, why I can connect to some but not all computers at site "a" but I am not able to remotely connect to any computers at site "b".
Why I can do remote installs of Eset Endpoint Security on roughly 10% of the clients but the other 90% fail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, TIA
 

john-b691

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Sep 29, 2012
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I am going to assume you can always ping any machine via ip address and your problem is DNS related.

If your router can instead of running the DHCP server run a dhcp/bootp helper pointing to your server you should be able to centralizer control of your ip addresses.
 

daniep3

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Nov 15, 2012
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Thanks for the info John, unfortunately I cannot ping any machines not on the servers subnet. I was hoping that by creating reverse lookup zones the dns might work better and records are now updating (but old ones are not getting cleaned up, something else I need to look into). The business is a non profit and does not want to spend any money if possible. The routers (cisco rv042) do not appear to support dhcp/bootp helper. They do have the option of dhcp relay instead of server, do you think that would be the way to go? TIA
 

john-b691

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Sep 29, 2012
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If you cannot ping by IP there is a routing issue. The defaut gateway for both networks should point to the router. It gets a little tricky when your central router has 2 spoke tunnels on it. You will many times need to put in static routes so it knows which network is down which tunnel.

The DHCP relay is another name for the helper. Strange cisco would not be constant but it is commonly called relay on other vendor platforms.