Kernel Confusion

DirectAccess is a great technology and I love to use it. If I get connection problems, I just open up my command line and examine the ipconfig output to see if something’s wrong. But is this something all your customers and colleagues are capable to do? I think not. Especially in rather large deployments, DirectAccess might put your help desk under a lot of pressure.

To reduce such calls and ease the complexity of debugging actual problems, Microsoft’s DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant might come in handy. It’s a small tool that notifies the user of his current connection status and helps to provide valuable information to the help desk.

So let me show it to you in action.
After setup it will show up in the user’s tray bar.

DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant in traybar

A simple single click informs about the current status (as does the tooltip).

DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant balloon

A right-click offers two options: “Advanced Diagnostics” and a DNS preferation setting (we will come to that later)

DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant right-click menue

The “Advanced Diagnostics” window offers more detailed information about the status and will generate log files upon its launch. Those can be send via the “Email logs” button to a prespecified address. It also has a link to your company’s help desk web page.

DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant Advanced Diagnostics

You will need to use the supplied ADMX/ADML files to configure the agent via Group Policy.
To do this, on your Domain Controller, copy the “DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant GP.admx” file to the folder “%systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions” and then copy the “DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant GP.adml” file to the folder “%systemroot%\PolicyDefinititions\language”. For example “%systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\en-us” or “%systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\de-DE”.

After that, you can launch the Group Policy Management MMC, open your DirectAccess GPO and navigate to “Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant”. You can now specify a couple of settings needed to use the tool.

At this point, I would like you to read the Deployment Guide supplied with the download, as it will help you to successfully deploy and configure your Assistant.