mcternan

Q: Profile Manager - Push DNS settings

Does anyone know of a way to push DNS settings to enrolled OSX machines via Profile Manager?

 

I've had a look at some different Custom Settings but have not been able to figure out a way to push these.

 

Anyone had any luck trying this?

Mac mini (Late 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Oct 25, 2015 7:45 PM

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Q: Profile Manager - Push DNS settings

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  • by John Lockwood,

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Oct 26, 2015 3:40 AM in response to mcternan
    Level 6 (9,349 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Oct 26, 2015 3:40 AM in response to mcternan

    It is normally not necessary and likely to cause problems doing this. Your DHCP server should be how you tell your client devices what DNS address to use. The main exception would be for VPN connections and then the VPN server would tell the VPN clients what DNS address to use.

     

    I cannot think of any scenario that would benefit from doing this via Profile Manager and whats more as you need an already working DNS configuration on the client device in order to talk to your Profile Manager it would also seem impossible to achieve. (As DHCP would work before the client has managed to talk to the Profile Manager this again shows DHCP is the best way of doing this, on top of that mobile devices like laptops and iPhones need DNS even when outside your own network.)

  • by jeffzimmm,

    jeffzimmm jeffzimmm Apr 18, 2016 11:04 AM in response to John Lockwood
    Level 1 (8 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Apr 18, 2016 11:04 AM in response to John Lockwood

    Hi John,

     

    I work in an environment where this is desirable. We do use DHCP to point clients to our DNS server. But we have two DNS servers with different forwarders. I would like to be able to remotely configure our iOS devices to use a secondary DNS server instead of the primary.

  • by John Lockwood,

    John Lockwood John Lockwood Apr 18, 2016 11:55 AM in response to jeffzimmm
    Level 6 (9,349 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Apr 18, 2016 11:55 AM in response to jeffzimmm

    As mentioned I cannot see a way of doing it the way you want. The nearest solution I can see would be to have two DHCP servers each configured to only accept requests from the MAC addresses belonging to the iOS devices you want to use. Then each DHCP server can provide different DNS settings.

     

    Many DHCP servers cannot be configured to only accept certain devices but I believe Apple's can.

     

    Another completely different approach would be to setup two different web proxy servers, you can push proxy settings to the iOS devices. Without knowing why you are trying to do this bizarre approach I cannot tell if this would be suitable.