Hello Experts!

I realy need som help with a little issue regarding getting my w2k clients to search a parent domain when quarying my DNS server. I hope this is something that can be solved just by doing something fancy with the DNS server. I'm a supergreen newbie ofcourse, and pretty bad at english, but please bare with me. This is my situation:

I'm using BIND9 on a machine running Debian (there are several slaves actually, but that is not important), and all the clients are running w2k. For the moment, everything works fine. But my company have now decided to implement Active Directory. This is going to require dynamic update capabilities from my DNS. This is no problem, but to keep zonefiles clean and for a bunch of other reasons we are going to have a childdomain for all the clients, wich the dhcpserver will update dynamicly. The servers will be under the parent domain, for example:

The client will be called:

client20.client.domain.net

and the server:

server40.domain.net

This works fine, exept for one thing; when the clients are trying to reach a specific server, they just search the client.domain.net domain, not the parent. If all our servers had been w2k servers, WINS would have eliminated this problem, but that is not the case. And due to the LARGE number och clients, manually configuring the dns suffix search order is not an option.

I have read a lot of info about using Active Directory and non-ms DNS servers, but nothing realy solves this problem for me. I read something about "WINS" records in the DNS, allowing the DNS server to forward the query to a WINS-server, but this type of record is only supported by MS-DNS.

Since I can't find any info that addresses my problem directly, I'm starting to belive that this is actually not an issue at all, and I'm just to crappy at all this nameresoulution stuff, so I can't figure it out. So please, could someone give me hint on how to get this to work?

- Danne

Hi,

I am trying to solve a similar problem. This link may help explain the issues involved. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Oper..._20654099.html

My environment has Win2003 & XP clients. I am using Linux for DNS & DHCP. One solution (for me) is to use the Group Policy Object editor & under Admin Templates - Network - DNS Client, there is a property "DNS Suffix search list".
This ONLY works with Win 2003 & WinXP.

I would prefer to have a solution which allowed me to set multiple dns suffix searches using DHCP option 15 or similar. But as the experts-echange link explains, earlier Microsoft DHCP clients do not support this setting. You could try one of or a combination of the ideas found in the link.,

Good luck.

PS. In the meantime, if I am able to come up with something more, I will post it here