Windows 2000 Professional and Dynamic DNS

[allmity]

Does anyone know of any reason that we should not disable the dynamic update of clients to our DNS server. We are trying to eliminate extra traffic to our DNS server. We currently do not allow our DNS to accept these connections to no ill effect, but I wanted to check with the field to see if there was a real reason.

Thanks,
Jim

 

[Sithl0rd]

Disabling Dyanmic DNS on your network is a big No. Espcially if you are trying to reduce bandwidth usage on a network.
Windows 2000 uses DNS as its primary Name lookup. Disabling Dynamic update of DNS entries will cause the Win2k machines to resolve incorrect ip address from names and vice vera if u have a reverse zone, espically if you use dynamic ip addresses on the machines.
If you have stopped the Win2k machines from being DNS clients all together (and no Wins Server is setup, which i dont recommend to use with win2k anyway) they resort to using NetBIOS broadcasts to do name lookups. This causes huge broadcast traffic on a network. Which will slow down the network considerably. And another limitation of NetBIOS lookups is that they cant resolve Fully Qualifed Domain Names (FQDN), which really sucks on a win2k network.

Since you are trying to restrict traffic to that DNS Server, my suggestion is that you setup another DNS server with the same zone as your existing DNS server (and preferably set them to Active Directory Intergrated) and set them to replicate. Set the Win2k machines to use the 2nd DNS server.