Active Directory with router as DHCP/DNS

Dale Walker

2/3/24, 11:06 PM

I've got a small Windows server 2012 Essentials server at home. Apart from a device to study AD, it has been used as media server and as a backup server. I had it set up as recommended with DHCP and DNS on the domain controller. The server was running 24/7. Everything was fine.

With energy prices sky high right now, and the server costing me a significant amount to run 24/7, to cut costs, I now to turn off the server when I don't need it. Obviously, with DHCP & DNS on the server, this broke my network when it's not switched on. So now I have DHCP and DNS on my router and a broken AD network (as you would expect).

I know all the advice is to run DHCP and DNS on the Domain controller but is there any way to set up my network so I can still have DHCP and DNS when my server is switched off and still be able to use AD for authentication when it is switched on?

I'm just wondering why DHCP and DNS has to be on the domain controller and can't be elsewhere. I'd rather not dump my server for a NAS if I don't need to and it would be a good project for me if there are ways to get around this problem, even the the approach is non standard and not recommended.

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active-directory

Greg Askew

2/4/24, 5:16 AM

`I can still have DHCP and DNS when my server is switched off and still be able to use AD for authentication when it is switched on?` Not really, no. When you turn server back on, any AD "clients" will need to be modified to use that server as DNS.

Appleoddity

2/4/24, 5:46 AM

The DHCP does not matter. Nothing significant happening there. Just put it on the router. The DNS is critical though. Things aren’t going to work right if you have domain joined PCs operating without a domain controller. However, if you can configure your DHCP options you could configure the primary DNS as your domain controller and the secondary DNS as your router. That way, when DC is on primary DNS is in effect. When DC is off, DNS requests failover to secondary DNS server after a short period of time. The existing answer is also another way.

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Server

vidarlo

2/3/24, 11:15 PM

DNS and DHCP can be whereever you want. What's actually important is that your AD clients can resolve the domain DNS records properly, so your DNS server should forward AD related requests to your domain server. This may be done with for instance a forwarding configuration.

I host AD environments where the DNS servers are caching Bind servers on Unix. That works like a charm because of forwarding zones.

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