How can I change the windows local domain DNS setting?

January 28, 2009 9:06 AM

How can I change the windows local domain DNS setting?

How do i modify the windows local domain (aka default domain)? I am not speaking of the windows/workgroup/logon domain, I am talking about the local DNS setting. I want to change how DNS is resolved, so that when the DNS resolver concatenates the request for google, I control what domain it concats with. So instead of "www.google.com.192.168.1.1" it would instead concat to "www.google.com.somedomain.com"

posted by torpark to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Well if what you're trying to do is get web addresses to resolve to a different host than DNS is returning, you can add those entries to your HOSTS file. On Windows, that's likely in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc.
posted by JaredSeth at 9:59 AM on January 28, 2009

Control-Panel -> Network Connections
right click your network, select properties.

In the window that appears, find the item labeled "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)", select properties. select Advanced. click on the DNS tab, look for the boxes labeled "Append these DNS suffixes".
posted by nomisxid at 10:01 AM on January 28, 2009

Perfection. Now can you tell me is there a way to change these settings with command-line based operations? :)
posted by torpark at 10:39 AM on January 28, 2009

from the command line? You might be able to work up some sort of .reg file that you could apply with regedit, but every machine would have to use the same naming scheme for the network interface, I think.
posted by nomisxid at 11:05 AM on January 28, 2009

I'm pretty sure netsh would be the tool for that. You might have to get clever to figure out the interface name if it's not consistent as nomisxid mentioned but that should be doable with ipconfig in your batch file.
posted by phax at 5:39 AM on January 31, 2009