Introduction To Networking - Parkland    

Last Modified:
Sunday, 18-Mar-2007 12:30:17 CDT

DNS Configuration

Connecting a client to a DNS Server

In order for a client to use DNS Services it must be properly configured to use the services provided by it's DNS Server. This page describes how to configure Windows XP TCP/IP to use Domain Name Service(DNS).


To configure DNS:

1) Click Start, click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections, and then click Network Connections.

2) Right-click the network connection that you want to configure, and then click Properties.

3) On the General tab (for a local area connection), or the Networking tab (for all other connections), click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and then click Properties.

4) Click Advanced, and then click the DNS tab.

5) To configure more than one DNS server IP address, under DNS server addresses, in order of use, click Add.

6) In TCP/IP DNS server, type the IP address of the DNS server, and then click Add, as shown in Figure 1 below.

7) To set your host's NetBIOS Machine name you should generally set it (in My Computer | Properties) to be the host portion of it's FQDN.
Win XP DNS Control Panel

 To modify the resolution behavior for unqualified DNS names

1) To resolve an unqualified name by appending the primary DNS suffix and the DNS suffix of each connection (if configured), click Append primary and connection specific DNS suffixes. If you also want to search the parent suffixes of the primary DNS suffix up to the second-level domain, click to select the Append parent suffixes of the primary DNS suffix check box.

2) To resolve an unqualified name by appending the suffixes from a list of configured suffixes, click Append these DNS suffixes (in order), and then click Add to add suffixes to the list.In the Domain suffix box we place the remainder of the FQDN, IMPORTANT: This has nothing to do with a Windows NetBIOS Domain, this is the Domain Portion of the FQDN. Acceptable entries in here would look like typical X.500 dot delimited objects such as google.com and parkland.edu.
Win XP DNS Control Panel

 3) To configure a connection-specific DNS suffix, type the DNS suffix in DNS suffix for this connection.

  • DNS Server Search ORDER:
    In the DNS Server Search order we can have several DNS Servers specified. Our client will always try the first server on the list first, if it is down it will then try the secondary one, if that one is down it will try the third or tertiary DNS server. We must know the IP address of at least one DNS server in order to use DNS services.

  • Domain Suffix Search Order:
    The suffix search order is where you place one or more suffix searches. A suffix search is a search that will append the suffix search order to any ambiguous machine name reference. So, if you had a suffix search order entry (like in our screen shot here) of csit.parkland.edu, and you typed ping mcnuggets your system would append the suffix of csit.parkland.edu to mcnuggets and your resolver would query it's DNS server to find the IP address of mcnuggets.csit.parkland.edu . If mcnuggets.csit.parkland.edu was a host registered in the DNS database then the DNS server would return the IP address to your host and your host would then send out the pings in hope of finding the host up and on the network.
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