Recently we spun up a bunch of shiny new Windows 2008 R2 servers for testing in our lab. Everything appeared to be fine, R2 is awesome and includes a bunch of new features that make remote desktop delivery even better.

 

I did however find a strange problem with our new demo environment; I had no issues browsing Google, Yahoo, and any other websites. However, Microsoft related websites were not loading properly; I would try to go to microsoft.com, msdn.com, or bing.com and would be greeted with this error page.

 

 

I went through the standard troubleshooting; checked DNS, checked my network configuration, checked and double-checked everything. I was getting frustrated and called my datacenter. They saw no problems. I eventually noticed that some of my servers who had their DNS set to a non-R2 2008 server did not have these issues. This lead me to believe the issue lied with R2 somehow.

 

After doing a bit of googling I came across a blog posting from Scott Forsyth. He noticed the same issue and got to the bottom of it. You can read his full analysis here.

 

The fix is simple; Disable Microsoft EDns services via the command line.

dnscmd /config /EnableEDNSProbes 0

 

No restart is necessary and you should be able to browse Microsoft sites with no issues.