Intermittent Connectivity on an old Windows Server

I’ve got a client with an old Windows Small Business Server 2011, which is based on on Server 2008 R2. I installed Zerotier and noticed it is intermittently losing connection. Sometimes it loses its connection completely. After a service restart, it goes back to the same intermittent behaviour as before. The ZT web control panel shows no connectivity loss. The GUI and CLI also report they are connected.

I installed a tool called PingInfoView, which is a GUI ping tool that keeps history and stats. Over a roughly 10 hour period, it reported a 56% ping success rate. Looking at the history, I noticed that most of the time it goes in cycles of 10 mins connected and then 10 mins disconnected/not working. This behavior repeats the 10 mins cycles strangely like clock work. There are a few stretches of the ping failing in the middle of an “on” cycle though, so the cycle did not go uninterrupted for the whole 10-ish hours.

Anyways, would anyone have any ideas how to troubleshoot this? If I can’t figure this out, I was thinking of spinning up a small Linux VM on another server to run a ZT bridge. I was thinking of using Ubuntu server. Would there be another Linux distro that would be easier to setup?

Since no one replied, I went with the Linux VM bridge.

I got a Debian 11 amd64 ISO and installed it into a Hyper-V VM with a 16GB disk, 2 cores and 1GB RAM. For the install, I deselected the GUI and the only option selected was ssh. Besides the official Zerotier documentation on creating a bridge, I used two other references (link1 and link2). Add the routing info and mark the Debian machine as a bridge in the ZT admin panel and I could now ping the remote network.

I then configured a laptop to define the remote network’s DNS server for the ZT interface to get active directory working on it (sorry, “new users can’t post more than 2 links in one post”. See my next reply for the link). Everything seemed to work as if I was local (though slower of course).

Afterwards, I ran ‘dh -f’ and ‘free -m’ to check the disk and memory usage respectively. Amazingly, it looked like only 1.2GB of disk space and 111 MB of RAM was being used. A 16GB disk is pretty small already so I didn’t bother with it. I did change the VM to use 512MB of RAM … I didn’t want to push my luck with less RAM just yet. :wink:

Here’s the link for setting the DNS server for the ZT interface : ZeroTier DNS on Windows - Networking - Spiceworks

Sorry we missed this one. Glad it’s working. We would have suggested using linux.

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