The OptionKey Blog: Fixing Failover Cluster DNS Error 1196 DNS Failure

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Fixing Failover Cluster DNS Error 1196 DNS Failure

From time to time you might see DNS Registration Error 1196 on your DNS for your cluster nodes. This is caused by the network binding order getting changed up, auto configured etc. I'm not sure how or why DNS binding orders get changed when they are manually configured but it is a pretty trivial fix. You can do one of 2 things, manually set the DNS for networks where you don't want the host to have DNS (just blank it) or you can change the binding order. In this post we are going to change the binding order for the DNS on the cluster nodes.

You will see dns errors much like what is shown below in your Failover cluster manager.

To change your binding Order on Server 2012R2 is pretty simple. First make sure you have show menus turned on in your folder options.

Then go to your "Network and Sharing Center"

Select "Change adapter Settings" once you see your list of network adpaters select from the menu Advanced -> Advanced Settings

You will see a window popup with your network adapters. Change the order so that the network you want to be accessed first is at the top of your list.

Once you have the networks in the order you want close the window by hitting ok. As you can see by the powershell window below, we had issues finding a server node on our cluster and after the changes we were able to get a full listing.

In server 2016, to change the binding order is in the IPV4 metric Properties. The lower the number the high the binding order. So for example if you have 3 networks,

Intranet - Metric 1
Web App - Metric 10
Internet - Metric 20

The network Intranet gets priority over Web App and Internet, so if you have a DNS server on your network the client checks Intranet for any DNS lookup first before trying the other 2 networks if a DNS server is supplied. Intranet also gets all network priority over the other adapters.