Is there a standard method for assigning nameservers to servers in a Windows domain?

Posted by HopelessN00b on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by HopelessN00b
Published on 2012-10-01T18:46:16Z Indexed on 2012/10/01 21:40 UTC
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As the title asks, I'm wondering if there's any standard or "best practice" for how to actually assign nameservers (DNS) and manage the nameserver configuration for client servers on a Windows domain.

I'm talking about the setting circled in the below image, in case the language of the question is not clear enough:

DNS server settings, on a server

This is for a large, multi-site environment, where ideally/hopefully all servers point at their site's Domain Controller as the primary DNS server, and a DNS server at a different site as the secondary DNS server. For simplicity's sake, we can say that the secondary server would be the Domain Controller at the home site for everyone, and there are no tertiary DNS servers (even though that's not actually the case).

Try as I might, I can't seem to find a GPO setting for this (at least on FL 2003 R2, the Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> DNS Client -> DNS Servers GPO is Supported on: Windows XP Professional only), and I find it rather hard to believe that the "best"/"standard" solution would therefore be either scripting up something to apply the DNS settings per site, or using a DHCP server to push those configurations out to the other servers via the DHCP Scope Options.

So, is there a standard way of managing this configuration? (That's hopefully not "a script" or "DHCP Scope Option.)

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