Thursday, January 20, 2011

Force Mac OS X to Re-Register with Dynamic DNS

In our heterogenous, corporate computing community, Active Directory no longer only supports Windows based clients. In many companies, Mac OS X workstations & servers are bound to the directory. One issue I have encountered from time to time are Mac OS X bound clients not registering themselves in Active Directory integrated DNS. With a Windows client, you would either run ipconfig /registerdns or restart the DHCP Client to force a re-registration in DNS. Neither of those options are available for Mac OS X client. In Mac OS X, start a terminal session type sudo net ads dns register.  If you want more information about the binding of your Mac OS X system, run net ads status from your Terminal session.
Posted by Robert M. Toups, Jr. at 1/20/2011 07:00:00 PM
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8 comments:

  1. MattRKSeptember 12, 2011 at 7:15 PM

    I was searching the net looking for the mac equivalent to ipconfig /registerdns and found your blog. My OS X machines, however, do not have the net ads command. Is this a 3rd party application? Just curious.

    Thanks!

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  2. Robert M. Toups, Jr.September 13, 2011 at 11:16 AM

    My guess is that you are running Mac OS X 10.7. In prior versions of Mac OS X, the command "net" is located at /usr/bin/net. Apple removed Samba from Mac OS X 10.7 due to the license change to GPLv3. The "net" command is a part of the Samba package and what Apple used to integrate with Active Directory prior to Mac OS 10.7. I need to research to equivalent in Mac OS X 10.7. I will post an entry when I discover the update. I have just recently upgraded an Active Directory connected Mac to 10.7.

    ReplyDelete
  3. MattRKSeptember 15, 2011 at 12:35 PM

    Same here. We just upgraded four of our Mac Pros to 10.7 and i'm trying to get them to dynamically register with DNS. We are also having a hell of a time getting them bound to AD. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and if you reboot the machine sometimes it stops working. Have fun with that one. I'm going to wait on 10.7.2 before we roll out 10.7 anywhere else.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousOctober 14, 2011 at 4:47 AM

    Hey there,

    Have been doing testing on mac in our Enterprise Network, even before the official release was out. The 10.7.2 fixes the *terrible* AD binding issues of Lion for the clients. i don't have any issues with DNS on client level, but my Lion Server just plain does not register to windows DNS.
    If anyone finds the NET equivalent, please do share :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. pandafooOctober 28, 2011 at 12:52 PM

    Has anyone figured this out? I was going to try the macports samba install, but you would have to install xcode on all the machines as well. I really need to figure out how to do this now that 'net' is no longer available.

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  6. donkeyFebruary 28, 2012 at 4:37 PM

    Hey there guys - anyone sorted that at all?

    ReplyDelete
  7. jeffinveniceJuly 10, 2012 at 12:22 PM

    about the middle of june, our DNS updates stopped working with our mac clients in AD environment. wondering if it was an os update or server issue... anyone else?

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousSeptember 27, 2013 at 9:50 AM

    Any update will be very usefull...

    ReplyDelete

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