Lion doesn't register with AD's Dynamic DNS

I'm in a similar boat. I have 10.7.2 machines on a university network that will not register with our AD's dyndns.

In Snow Leopard, all I have to do for this to work is, set the hostname under System Preferences>Sharing and in the terminal via SCUTIL. Once the hostname is set, I just need to bind to AD. At that point I can remotely manage/ping/etc the machine via the FQDN with the hostname I set and the domain name of our AD (ie. mysethostname.mydomain.edu).

I have used this same method on multiple Lion machines and it simply doesn't register. At least, it's not working here on campus. So, for example, I need to remotely manage a Mac with ARD, I can't with the hostname I set. Instead, I am forced to have the user go into System Preferences>Sharing, click Remote Management, and read of the actual FQDN which is apparently set by our DHCP server. That, or I have to remotely manage via the IP address. Either way, I have to have someone on the other end manually find out this information...not cool.

Any insight on what I'm doing wrong/need to do is really appreciated.

Thanks.

-Rob

Hey there guys - did anyone manage to fix this? Having the same issue on 10.7.3.

I did manage to get this working by going into the Sharing icon under System Preferences and clicking on "edit" then check the "use global hostname" option and set the hostname that you want registered in DNS and then enter any username and password that can login to the AD domain. I am just not sure exactly what it takes to actually get it to show up in DNS. I was thinking a renew of the DHCP address but a reboot should definitely do it.

I'm late to the party on this one but I'm seeing the same behavior still in 10.7.4 on my MBP. The difference is we're not using MS DNS but Infoblox DHCP/DNS. I was told by one of the DNS admins that there's a policy that if a machine attempts to register without a hostname, it will submit "<nic_mac_address>-null" as the host name. That's exactely what I'm seeing at boot. I can fix it by bouncing the NIC with

sudo ifconfig en0 down && sudo ifconfig en0 up

but I shouldn't have to. But not being able to resolve the hostname is a bigger problem so I may have to figure out how to have this command run pre-logon. Or maybe there's something to the "capabilities" of the network device in ifconfig? But I don't know how much of that is client or server set. Still open to ideas...

robfromindianapolis wrote:

I'm in a similar boat. I have 10.7.2 machines on a university network that will not register with our AD's dyndns.

I have used this same method on multiple Lion machines and it simply doesn't register. At least, it's not working here on campus. So, for example, I need to remotely manage a Mac with ARD, I can't with the hostname I set. Instead, I am forced to have the user go into System Preferences>Sharing, click Remote Management, and read of the actual FQDN which is apparently set by our DHCP server. That, or I have to remotely manage via the IP address. Either way, I have to have someone on the other end manually find out this information...not cool.

Any insight on what I'm doing wrong/need to do is really appreciated.

If your using the full ARD Admin application then you can 'scan' for new machines, add them to a group and if needed modify the hostname shown in ARD Admin. Thereafter even if the IP address of the Mac changes it automatically informs the ARD Admin console and you can see it in the list of computers you have created.

If your only using Screensharing rather than ARD Admin then yes life will be more difficult.