Windows 2012 R2: Static IP displays as DHCP IP

• Ben Liebowitz
• December 2, 2016
• 0
• 1206

I ran across this issue this week with a bunch of new servers I built using a new Windows 2012 R2 Image I built and captured using Symantec Altiris.  There must have been some sort of corruption in the image that caused this issue. 

The issue displays like this…  You set a static IP on your server (in this case, they were physical Dell Rack Mount servers).  After clicking OK, you go back into the NIC properties and into IPv4 Properties and it displays as if using DHCP. 

Then, if you do an IPCONFIG, you can see DHCP is disabled…

To fix this…

1. Open Regedit

2. Navigate to HKLM – System – CurrentControlSet – Control – Network

3. Backup the entire NETWORK key by right clicking, choosing EXPORT, and saving network.reg somewhere locally.

4. Delete the CONFIG key

5. Reboot.
6. When the server comes back up, go back into Network Connections and verify the network info is readable.

I couldn’t find a specific KB to fix this, but found a post on plugable.com by Bob Boener that described a similar issue and what he did to fix it.  His solution worked for me, so I documented each step for my team and thought I’d share it here.

Hope this helps someone.  

Ben Liebowitz, VCP, vExpert
NJ VMUG Leader