Problem:
You’re imaging a machine on a network segment not serviced by a DHCP server.
On the first screen of the Task Sequence Wizard – the one that says ‘Welcome to the Task Sequence Wizard‘ – you click the ‘Configure Network Settings‘ button and enter the ‘Configure Static IP Network Settings‘ screen.
After entering everything in correctly and clicking ‘OK‘, you receive the following error:

Configure Network Settings Error: Enter the DNS server IP address.
Troubleshooting:
- The network configuration you entered is correct.
- You reboot, try again, same error.
- Maybe you try another machine and it works
- Maybe you try another machine and it doesn’t work.
Potential Cause 1:
In my limited experience, this seems happens when you’re trying to set IP details on an adapter in a VMware VM that’s not connected. We saw this on a few VMware VM’s that were recently stood up and had adapters but not connected to any networks. Oops.
Potential Cause 2:
This is more of a delay/timing issue: While configuring a handful of VMware VM’s, I hit my stride with entering the IP information and found that when I entered the DNS IP address, tabbed down to the domain suffix and pressed [Enter] I’d get this error. If I tried again another 1-2 seconds after getting the error it would accept.
Because I was running into this so often I spent a little time trying to test this and anecdotally it seems that when you make modifications to the domain suffix field, something happens behind the scenes that causes this delay. I found that if I excluded the domain suffix field I didn’t have this problem at all. I also learned that if I entered the domain suffix first then entered the DNS IP address I didn’t have this problem either.
It’s not clear what’s going on but I just need to ‘Trust But Verify’ the VM configuration and slow down when entering the details. (^_^)
Good Providence to you!