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Thursday, August 27, 2009

How to add a DNS suffix from a command prompt

We recently moved our datacenter, which involved adding our servers to our new domain and related DNS server (let's call it mydomain.com).  Previously, users connected to a telnet server by hostname (let's call it server1).  Well, after moving our datacenter, users could no longer connect to the server unless they used its FQDN of server1.mydomain.com. 

At this point we knew we'd have to hit every single computer (hundreds) on our network to update their preset connections.  We had an option -- we could either join each machine to the domain, or we could add a DNS suffix of mydomain.com to their local area connection tcp/ip properties.  We opted for the latter, since joining each machine to the domain would take longer, and is unnecessary considering we're in the process of rolling out thin clients to replace each of these machines.

In order to add a DNS suffix to a TCP/IP connection remotely, all you need is a list of IP addresses and the following command:
wmic /USER:administrator /PASSWORD:adminpassword /node:@c:\iplist.txt nicconfig call SetDNSSuffixSearchOrder (mydomain.com)

Where C:\iplist.txt contains a list of IP addresses, line separated.

After running this command for all of the IP addresses, users could then resolve server1 without needing to type out the whole FQDN.  Of course, this command could also be put in a script if you wanted to use it in such a way as well. 

Happy Networking!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Matt!!! Very useful

Anonymous said...

I know this is an old post, but I searched a bunch of sites for how to do this and none of the "solutions" worked. I came across this one and this works like a charm.

Thank you sir, you just saved me about 4 billion hours of extra work.