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Really it's your discretion on how you would like your domain setup, we're on the campus ad.msu.edu over here at University Relations and there really are no drawbacks except not having complete control over your domain (joining exchange servers requires enterprise admins (from AIS) to put in their password to join the exchange server to the domain. As for your issue, if you ran your own domain, with your own DNS server, but MSU DHCP, any computer that is joined to the domain SHOULD check in with the dns server and report back it's IP. That is, if you have computer-1.ad.aec.msu.edu, and your DNS server is authoritative to have complete control over that ad.aec.msu.edu domain, from anywhere in the world your portables in zambia should be able to use whatever DNS server they connect to locally to lookup computer2.ad.aec.msu.edu, get a response back, and continue working off whatever local DNS server zambia has. Hope this helps. Chris Harper TECH SUPPORT [log in to unmask] (517) 355-6611 x 125 University Relations • Michigan State University 1330 S. Harrison • East Lansing, MI 48823 -----Original Message----- From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Wolf Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2004 9:20 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [MSUNAG] Windows DNS and Portable Computers We are setting up a new Windows domain to replace our old NT domain and we're facing what seems to be a problem with DNS. I'd like to know how others have dealt with this. The problem we foresee is with portable computers, which we always set up to use DHCP. The computers are members of our domain and the users log on as domain users. This works fine with our Windows NT domain. Of course, with Active Directory, all of our domain computers have to be able to do DNS lookups in our aec.local namespace. The "standard" Microsoft way to do this seems to be either to a) run our own DHCP server (which would cause problems on MSU's network) to go with our DNS servers or b) override the automatic DNS setting for DHCP by putting in the fixed addresses of our own DNS servers. Our problem is that our portable computers are used for travel and get plugged into networks all over the world. Right now this works fine with just a standard, fully automatic DHCP setup. If for our new domain we set the portables up as in b) above, I'm worried about what will happen when someone plugs their computer into a network in Zambia. The DHCP would still work properly to obtain an IP address for them, but with DNS set to the fixed address of our server, every single DNS request would have to go half way around the globe and back, which can't be a desirable situation (poor performance). When we discussed this with the Microsoft rep who was here a few weeks ago, he agreed that would not be good and said that the solution was for MSU's DNS server to have an entry for our local domain, pointing DNS lookups for that domain to our server. Then the portable computers could be set up with fully automatic DHCP, including automatic DNS, and they would work properly regardless of where they are in the world. I asked Doug Nelson about this and he said no one else on campus had asked for this type of setup. How are the rest of you dealing with this issue? Thanks. --Chris ============================================== Chris Wolf Computer Service Manager Agricultural Economics [log in to unmask] Michigan State University 517 353-5017