Exchange 2013 DNS Settings Cause Transport Services to Crash

I ran into a problem at a customer recently with two Exchange 2013 servers where the ‘Microsoft Exchange Frontend Transport’ (MSExchangeFrontEndTransport) service would crash continually. It would eventually bring down the ‘Microsoft Exchange Transport’ (MSExchangeTransport) and ‘Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Transport Submission’ (MSExchangeSubmission) services. This meant the server was responding to SMTP connections with ‘451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later. PRX2’ on attempting to submit a message.

The primary error in the Event Log was Event ID 1000:

Faulting application name: MSExchangeFrontendTransport.exe, version: 15.0.712.0, time stamp: 0x5199c77c
Faulting module name: Microsoft.Exchange.Net.ni.dll, version: 15.0.712.14, time stamp: 0x51b4dcae
Exception code: 0xc00000fd

The Exchange 2013 Health Service would try to recover the service, it would keep crashing, the Windows Problem Reporting service used up all the CPU and memory and the server would crash.

We eventually discovered the problem was with the IPv4 DNS settings. Because this organisation did not use dynamic DNS registration and statically registered DNS entries in BIND, the settings for ‘Register this connection’s addresses in DNS’ and ‘Use this connection’s DNS suffix in DNS registration’ were disabled as can be seen below. Enabling these again allowed the services to start immediately.

I have replicated this problem on Exchange 2013 CU2-v2 (build 15.0.712.24) and Exchange 2013 RTM build 15.0.516.32 running on Windows 2012. In a test of a single Windows 2008 R2 server it did not show the same problem.

I am not sure if this is a Windows 2012 bug or an Exchange bug, but a combination of these two are not playing nicely together with DNS registration disabled. The only reference I could find to this was a TechNet forum post

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/fc23776c-bae4-4ca9-ad6d-4f8df880f47c/451-470-temporary-server-error-please-try-again-later-prx2?forum=exchangesvrsecuremessaging