DNS name to update computer name

[5jgibbs]

Hello, i work for SUNY IT. The task of naming every computer on the domain can get very cumbersome. I was wondering if there was a way to pull the DNS name to name a computer automatically basses on its ip address. All our computers are static ip's so 150.156.84.5 is cad05.island.balah.sunyit.edu. So i would like that computer to have the name cad5 without anyone having to touch it.?

Thanks

Jeremy

 

[5jgibbs]

I forgot to add. We are using windows server 2003 for our DNS server. All these clients are XP pro sp2.

 

[GlenJohnson]

Why on earth are you using static ip's and not dhcp? If you have to touch the machine to assign a static ip, just give it a name then.

Glen A. Johnson
Johnson Computer Consulting

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[5jgibbs]

Well, is really a reservation made on the DHCP server. Which are basically static IP's.

 

[lhuegele]

So are you saying that the computer name is NOT the same as what's shown in DNS? If your machines are reporting to DNS then the name of the computer should already match the DNS entry for that computer.

Good luck,

 

[5jgibbs]

No, the computers dont pull the info from dns. Yes they appear in dns onced named. But all ip's are handed out by mac address. If we could define all the dns names first, bassed on the IP, then pull the name from dns, that would be better for our situation.

 

[lhuegele]

Ok, you still didn't really answer my question, so I have to go back to the beginning and ask you what problem are you trying to solve again? What exactly is the "situation" you're trying to fix?

 

[5jgibbs]

When we image our computers from ghost, we send a script around to join the computers to the domain. They have some kind of wierd name such as bright-temp or don-tem.island.****.sunyit.edu. So, we would like to pull names brassed on its ip address from DNS by doing an nslookup. All the ip addresses are by DHCP but we control it by mac address. So don03 's ip would be 150.156.93.3. So if we do an nslookup or "reverse lookup" we should get don03 from the dns. We would like that output to become the computers name. Just chop off the island.***.ad.sunyit.edu part because thats already there.

 

[lhuegele]

I can't remember if we do this with DHCP or with global policy, but there is a setting on the nic where you can tell your system to register itself with DNS. This makes sure that the computer name is in DNS as assigned.

Sounds like what you want is to take what you have in DNS and rename your machines to match that, but I still don't understand why your DNS names are different than the actual computer names. Does someone manually create DNS records in addition to the manual DHCP lease reservations??

I'm sure someone could write you a script that will do what you want, so perhaps you should post your question in the VBscript forum?

Good luck,