subdomain dns on windows server 2003 needing fully qualified name

Please excuse (or even better, correct) my misuse of terminology here, I'm a bit of a noob at this.

On my companies internal network, on the DNS server (server 2k3), if I create an AName record to an internal machine, say:

AndrewsPc 192.168.0.1

this works fine, and can be accessed from any networked machine no problem.

However, subdomains do not work without being fully qualified with the domain name. For example:

for the internal webserver i set up an AName like this:

CruiseControl 192.168.0.1

I'd like the sites on it to be configured as:

MySite.CruiseControl 192.168.0.1

however, the only way to access these sites is via:

MySite.CruiseControl.MyDomainName

where as i can Access CruiseControl via just CruiseControl i.e. it doesnt need to be CruiseControl.MyDomainName

I'm pretty sure I've setup dns records in exactly the same way on other networks and had no problem (i.e. not needed to add the domain on the end).

What is causing this and how do I make it so i can access subdomains without needing the full domain path?

Solution 1:

First, I will assume that you added your subdomain under the main domain that your internal network is using.

MyDomain
|--CruiseControl

Make sure that your clients all have the Append primary and connection specific DNS suffixes stetting enabled in the Advanced TCP/IP Settings dialog for their adapter.

Also ensure that you are pushing the DNS Domain Name option via DHCP. It should be set up with your primary domain.

I've tested your scenario in our network and it works fine to resolve an address like MySite.CruiseControl without adding the TLD MyDomain to the query.

Solution 2:

If you run ipconfig /all, it probably shows something like this near the top:

DNS Suffix Search List: example.com

If you just want to resolve names without having to type the domain, i'd make it look like this (i.e. list all of your domains here):

DNS Suffix Search List: example.com
                        subdomain.example.com

Now when your computer tries to resolve a "short" name like mysite, first it will try mysite.example.com (since that's the first domain in the search list), and if it can't resolve that, it will try mysite.subdomain.example.com. Of course, you can order the domains any way you want.

If you have a Windows 2003 domain, then you'll probably want to configure the DNS search list via group policy so that you don't have to configure it manually on every machine.