How could anyone be so stupid....

So I'm out here in Vegas now, and I'm trying to learn Active Directory and Group Policy and all that jazz. In my home network setup, I have a Win 2003 server (stonewall) and one Win XP profesh client (jupiter). I have 2 more windows computers, but they have the wretched (but cheaper) Win XP Home installed on them. So they can't receive Group Policy commands from stonewall because Windows Home doesn't play well with domain networks.

I'm pulling my hair out because jupiter won't "submit" to any domain GPO's (group policy objects) that I configure using the GPMC (group policy management console) on stonewall. It used to work, but now it won't. So I post a very professional question on Experts-Exchange.com (HELP!!!! this @#$%$! thing won't work!!!) but don't get any helpful replies. So I pull out the big guns. I post a "job" on Guru.com asking someone to please explain to me why jupiter just laughs at the the group policy commands sent down from stonewall. I get many replies, but the one that catches my eye says (paraphrasing) "99.9 percent of the time when there is a problem getting domain level GPOs to work it turns out to be a dns problem. Make sure that the client has the right address (in this case stonewall's address) for its dns server." What an insulting response, I think. But maybe it wouldn't hurt to just take a sec and check that out.......

Oops. From a quick "ipconfig /all" on jupiter, I see that jupiter is configured to use 2 dns servers neither one of which is stonewall. I immediately realize that jupiter is set to get its dns info from my local dhcp server (my Cisco 871w router) and my Cisco 871w just sends jupiter the 2 dns servers that it got (by dhcp) from Cox Communications, my ISP.

So that's the problem. It's not even a group policy problem, it's a basic network setup problem. I don't know the intricacies of Active Directory/Group Policy (yet) but I at least should know clients are supposed to be getting their dns info from their own Domain Controller......

So the Guru.com guy, who bid about the cheapest dollar price of any of the people who responded, fixed my problem without even bothering to hear the details! Wow. That's fine troubleshooting. The man has obviously seen a lot of mangled networks. Most of which probably had admins as dumb as me......

Finding the IP addresses of your DNS servers on Cisco

This is really just a note to myself. As long as I can make it back to this website, I can't lose the note!!!

On my home network, my Cisco 871w router acts as my gateway/firewall/dhcp server. To find out what DNS servers my Cisco 871w router (acting as a dhcp server to computers on my LAN) is sending out by dhcp to clients, do "show hosts". The output looks like:

Name lookup view: Global
Default domain is lv.cox.net
Name/address lookup uses domain service
Name servers are 68.105.x.x, 68.105.x.x


To see what "gateway of last resort" (default gateway) the 871w is using, do "show ip route". Amongst all the other route info, it will show you the gateway IP address.

The way to tell the 871w which dns server to give out to dhcp clients is in the code fragment below, which comes from the config file on the 871w router. The "dns-server" line is the actual line that assigns the dns server.

ip dhcp pool sdm-pool
import all
network 10.10.10.0 255.255.255.0
default-router 10.10.10.1
dns-server 10.10.10.50
lease 10

It seems like there ought to be away for the router to give the dhcp client computers more than one dns server, but I haven't haven't figured out how to do that yet.