Richard's Site

I encountered an little nagging issue the other day, so I thought that I would share the solution that I found. I have a server (Windows Server 2008) set up as a Domain Controller (2003 Functional Level). It is the only DC in the forest so it is also the DNS server and the Global Catalog server. I had multiple IP addresses associated with the only NIC installed in the machine, and of course I didn’t want it to register multiple A records with different IPs, but the same hostname. I took the obvious approach and unchecked the “Register this connection’s addresses in DNS”.

What the heck? It kept registering all of the IP addresses in DNS. It seemed pretty straight forward, but the solution lay elsewhere.

By default a DNS server will register all the IPs associated with it in DNS, because it listens on all of those IPs for DNS name resolution requests. The answer in this case was to open up the DNS Management Console, right click on the DNS server in the left pane, choose properties, and click on the “Interfaces” tab. This tab lists all of the IP addresses that the DNS server is listening on. Simply uncheck all except the primary address that clients are making requests on and voila! Just delete the old addresses from DNS (except the primary) and they will stop showing up in DNS.