Connect-DPMServer.ps1 will not connect

Interesting case that I just resolved.

Customer is using a third party software to perform SharePoint restores.  While trying to connect back to the DPM server from the other SharePoint application restoration server he was getting the following error:

After taking network traces and DPM MPS Reports, we started doing code reviews of how the connect-dpmserver.ps1 script works.

When you perform  a connect-dpmserver.ps1, we initiate communication to the DPM server via RPC.  Once the RPC connection is made, we then talk to the SQL server via TCP/IP.

We use a setting from the registry to let the connecting server know what the name of the server is and the instance of SQL that we try and connect too.  In a default installation the database name is MS$DPM2007$.  The connection string should reference <servername>\\\MS$DPM2007$.  In our customers situation the connection string was localhost\\\MS$DPM2007$.

This caused the connecting server to initiate communication to the DPM server and then the DPM server told it to connect to the local host; there was no DPM database on this server because only the DPM Management Shell was installed.

After changing the connection string we saw the following:

Why was it still failing?  DPM caches the information it collects from the registry to hand back to the servers that are trying to connect to it via the connect-dpmserver.ps1 script.  Not until we either restart the DPM service or reboot the server will DPM be re-populated with the correct information.

After restarting the DPM service we now see the following:

Walt Whitman

Support Escalation Engineer

Microsoft Platforms Core Team: DPM