Custom Nameservers

[Tony_G]

Hi All,

I just wanted to know what would be the best practice when configuring Meraki DHCP server. We have 22 office in different location. all of them Except our HQ uses Meraki DHCP. our HQ uses 2 DC as DHCP servers. should i put our HQ DC's to our other offices Meraki DHCP custom nameservers?

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

If your machines are Active Directory joined - then you should point the DNS for every branch to those AD controllers (and not use external DNS servers).

[Tony_G]

Hi Philip,

Thanks for your reply. Is there any reason why i should not use any external DNS servers. Also our branch devices are mixed of  AD joined and not.

[PhilipDAth]

Yes because if an AD joined machine needs to resolve an AD resource query and it gets sent to an external DNS the lookup will fail.

This tends to result in intermittent and random failures to users that can be difficult to re-produce.

[BlakeRichardson]

I'm surprised you were able to join those clients to the AD server if they were using external DNS.....

As mentioned use internal DNS if they are AD joined, if not external DNS might be faster. 

[Tony_G]

Our current setup on our merakis is configured with our internal DNS servers. I was just wondering if its really best practice since i saw some logs from one of our branches in east coast querying an external site going to our dns servers. Thanks for your inputs.