Windows DNS server

[Celegorm]

Well for you, you probably should point your dns on your computer's to be the routers ip

As I mentioned before I cannot do this as it's required for active directory and would case some additional warnings/errors until I switched back which is why I was looking to be able to set the secondary with the server to the router's/google's.

I sounds like it might just be too much work for what I'm hoping to achieve and once things settle the reboots wouldn't be that often.

 

[evan.briggs]

As I mentioned before I cannot do this as it's required for active directory and would case some additional warnings/errors until I switched back which is why I was looking to be able to set the secondary with the server to the router's/google's.

I sounds like it might just be too much work for what I'm hoping to achieve and once things settle the reboots wouldn't be that often.

Oh ya I see, maybe routing both dns the server and router to each computer. You can put mult dns on a computer.

And honestly look into making the server your dhcp as well. That's how I have mine setup
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[root]

either...
setup the active directory server to be a DNS primary and the router the DNS secondary (or 8.8.8.8 to be the secondary)

you can do this by walking round all the PCs,
or more likely use the DHCP settings

(expand the DHCP console, expand the scope, look in the scope options. and you'll see 006 DNS Servers, you can add a list of DNS servers here, (more than two if you want).

DNS servers are queried in turn.

Or, you can perhaps use your router as the DHCP server, in which case set your routers primary DNS server as your AD domain controller (so clients resolve queries here) and set the secondary dns server as the ISP or 8.8.8.8

 

[evan.briggs]

either...
setup the active directory server to be a DNS primary and the router the DNS secondary (or 8.8.8.8 to be the secondary)

you can do this by walking round all the PCs,
or more likely use the DHCP settings

(expand the DHCP console, expand the scope, look in the scope options. and you'll see 006 DNS Servers, you can add a list of DNS servers here, (more than two if you want).

DNS servers are queried in turn.

Or, you can perhaps use your router as the DHCP server, in which case set your routers primary DNS server as your AD domain controller (so clients resolve queries here) and set the secondary dns server as the ISP or 8.8.8.8

That's what I was trying to say

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[Celegorm]

Or, you can perhaps use your router as the DHCP server

That's what I want to do as I don't want to worry about phones and such going down while my server does updates or crashes do to tinkering

in which case set your routers primary DNS server as your AD domain controller (so clients resolve queries here) and set the secondary dns server as the ISP or 8.8.8.8

This I can easily do, but I don't think it'd really help. I'll try and take a screen shot of this tonight to help explain but with the server 2012 essentials connects you to the network it automatically changes the network adapter to over-ride the DHCP server's DNS account to point solely at itself so any configuration on the router is completely ignored if my server goes down.

To try and explain this in a different way. If I take my laptop to a coffee shop and look at the adapter's properties, the DNS option is set to automatically get DNS info from the router/network.

If I go home, connect to my wifi that option changes to over-ride the router's settings and use only the windows server DNS. Should I decide to connect to my neighbor's network for whatever reason, it automatically switches back to automatically getting DNS info from the router.

 

[root]

do you hava a DHCP server running on the 2012 server?

clients may connect to either server.


as an example I extended my wireless with an old router, so I have 2 routers, internet access worked fine, but occasionally I'd get a device that seemed to refuse to connect, that was because I'd left DHCP running on the old router, so occasionally a client would get this server as the fastest response and get incorrect network settings.


if you do use your server for DHCP and DNS
Obviously, all devices that had gotten IP addresses in the case of DHCP will still have an address if the server is restarted, new devices will not get an address, but may default to an older address, or simple send out another request for an address a minute of so later when the server is back up.

as said, you should configure your DHCP scope options on either the server (F you MUST use this? or the router if you can use this) to use the AD server a the primary DNS server (so that machine names etc are resolved successfully internally). and the router as a secondary DNS server.

I'm confused as to how the server would be changing the router settings, so I assume you mean that when you have a machine connected to the internal network then it picks up an address from the server as when you add the DC role a DHCP role is also added.

See if you can turn off that role, (just stop the service)
I think that ideally you should want to use the AD server as your DHCP server as you are able to configure a lot more options, (like DNS search suffix etc to aid name resolution). but you might not want to.

you say that this is for home, I'm wondering how many devices do you have disconnecting and connecting to the network at any given time? would it really be so difficult to wait for the server to restart after applying updates if your phone can't get wireless for a few minutes?

 

[Celegorm]

I have a fair amount connecting/disconnecting on a regular basis as customers ship/want back laptops that remotely connect to their network but it's my personal work laptop that'd actually get the DNS setting changed that had originally concerned me. Since we've found that it changes that setting at bootup I'm ok so long as I restart before trying to do work outside of home.

Also, some of the AT&T configurations don't seem to play well when anything else is dishing out IP addresses.

The more I tinker the more limited i realize the crappy AT&T router (which I cannot replace) is, no UPnP, port 443 cannot be forwarded to any connected device, cannot specify DNS servers or specify DHCP scope.