In setting up my Windows 2008 R2/SQL 2008 R2 cluster this week I came across a warning in the Setup Support Rules stating that “The domain network is not the first bound network.”

This didn’t make any sense to me as I had been very careful in setting the binding order in the network connections properties:

Deciding to look for further information on this I opened up the Detail.txt file from the Setup Bootstrap/Log directory and searched for network binding order:

Strangely the first bound network is Local Area Connect* 9. I had no idea what this network was as it was not listed in the network adapter list.

I remembered a discussion on Twitter a couple of weeks ago between Allan Hirt (blog|twitter) and Denny Cherry (blog|twitter) where they talked about this exact problem and the fact that it was a hidden cluster adapter which needed to be moved in the binding order, and that had to be done in the registry.

I opened up regedit and drilled down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesTcpipLinkage and opened up the Bind value:

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