Friday, February 10, 2006

Poor Windows 2003 DHCP server documentation?

While recently working with Windows 2003 DHCP server, I hit a big snag with Dynamic DNS.

Here's a copy of my post to the Windows forums after much frustration:

"After much testing and head-scratching, I've come to the conclusion that all
the documentation (both Microsoft and third party) is greatly misleading
regarding the radio button in Windows 2003 DHCP to "Always dynamically
update DNS A and PTR records".

I expected that when selected, that this would have all DHCP clients of the
server to register both their A records and PTR records in DNS. DHCP option
15 is set for the correct domain name, and DHCP option 6 lists the Windows
2003 DNS servers. The DHCP server is a member of the DNSUpdateProxy group
and I even added credentials to the DHCP server. (Note DNS and DHCP are not
on the same servers, not that it really matters in my situation.)

DHCP scopes configured to:
Enable DNS dynamic updates according to the settings below
Always dynamically update DNS A and PTR records
Discard A and PTR records when lease is deleted

The results of all this? XP and 2000 Clients only register their PTR
records. Why? They don't have the option to register their connections in
DNS selected on each XP and 2000 client? But why should they, I'm telling
DHCP to do it?

Anyway, I fixed it by checking the option on the DHCP server to "Dynamically
update DNS A and PTR records for DHCP clients that do not request updates
(for example, clients running Windows NT 4.0). I realize this is supposed
to be enabled by default, or that I could script it (although all the WMI
scripts I saw wouldn't work without SP2 on XP).

No offense, but all the wording in the interface and in the documentation
I've seen is a bit misleading on how all this should work."