Installing Windows Phone 8 SDK can prompt for the need to update your TCP/IP settings

A couple of days ago, I blogged about daylight savings time changes and problems with Remote Desktop connections thereafter. Today, I wanted to mention about a similar looking issue that started with the following Remote Desktop connection error:

Remote Desktop Connection
An authentication error has occurred.
The Local Security Authority cannot be contacted Remote computer: my-machine-name

Initially, I thought this would be some temporary problem, so I decided to install the latest Windows Updates and restart the machine. Unfortunately, this didn't help, so I started thinking what had changed in the last couple of days. Summertime ending issues had already been solved, but this problem didn't want to go away.

I had, however, installed the brand-new Windows Phone 8 SDK to my development machine the day before, and this immediately rang a bell: the Windows Phone 8 SDK uses Hyper-V virtualization, which also means that it installs virtual network adapters to your machine. It happens to be that in my environment, I have custom DNS records set up for TCP/IP (IPv4) networking, and these custom settings were wiped out while Hyper-V was enabled by the SDK installed.

The lesson: if you have customized your TCP/IP settings and you install/enable Hyper-V based programs/features on your machine, take a look at the networking settings afterwards.

And one again, the error message led to the correct direction: the Windows 8 machine couldn't contact Active Directory domain controller anymore because of incorrect DNS records. Make sure your DNS settings are right, and the problem goes away.