At a customer where they have a DirectAccess installation with 7 DirectAccess servers in a Multi-Site setup we were suttenly not longer open the DirectAccess Console.

When I tried to open the console on two of the DirectAccess servers I would get the following error:

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Today I had a Windows 8 client that could not connect to a DirectAccess server.

In the "Network Connection List" on the Windows 8 client it stated that the DirectAccess connection is "Connecting" and it stays as this forever.
Even though it said that it was still trying to connect to the DirectAccess server, a connection was indeed established. I could ping internal resources.

So it had to be the in Windows 8 build in Direct Access Network Connectivity Assistant that could not find out that a DA connection had been established.
In the configuration of the DirectAccess server the configuration wizard had added DirectAccess-WebprobeHost.domain.com as a “Network Connectivity Assistant” (NCA) Resource. This is the host name that the NCA will try to contact to determine if there is connectivity to the internal network.

It turned out that the DNS record for DirectAccess-WebprobeHost did not exist in the internal DNS.
According to this TechNet article the DNS A record for DirectAccess-WebprobeHost should point to the internal IP of the DirectAccess server.
After adding the DNS record and empty the DNS cache on the Windows 8 client it now shows in the “Network Connection List” that the status of the connection to the DirectAccess server is “Connected”.