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Monday, July 11, 2011

Multiple Standalone Windows Servers: DNS Suffix List

note: I am not sure what causes windows to reload this list, but I currently believe if you run ipconfig /flushdns and gpupdate /force this seems to reload the values. OK, in addition to this if they don’t work I have found that if disable and enable one your network adapters this will force the change to be picked up. I had teamed NICs, so was able to disable/enable a secondary adapter so not losing connectivity.

Recently I wanted to add a dns suffix to a range of windows servers, whilst this would have been easy had the servers existed in a domain. All the servers had were standalone so Group policy was not an option.

After searching the internet for a while I was still no clearer in what was the best option for configuring standalone servers. I did not want to mess with primary dns suffixes or have to setup specific connection specific dns suffixes.

I wanted a solution that would apply to all connections on the servers, and a solution I was able to apply remotely to all servers.

After messing with local policies, manual settings and registry settings. The best solution I found was a registry entry.

  • Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\DNSClient
  • String Value (REG_SZ): SearchList=dnssuffix1,dnssuffix2,dnss……

So I created a registry file with the necessary entries (see below)

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\DNSClient]
"SearchList"="dnssuffix1,dnssuffix2,dnssuffix3"


So a quick script using psexec and this was run on all servers.



Job Done…


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