The question is essentially in the title – I'm very new to servers and AD (studying for my first exam as of now and messing with VM's). My query is really, with DHCP installed in your domain, will it only dish out IP's and DNS details to domain joined computers? Would that mean in order to connect a machine to a domain you would need to configure static IP's since routers would naturally have DHCP switched off? And if this isn't the case, whats the benefit of using DHCP with AD if you can just control DHCP through your router (that is if DHCP isn't restricted to domain members only).
Thanks!
EDIT: For example – even if a non-domain joined computer connected up to the network on say a wireless AP (with DHCP fed to it from the DC itself with DHCP installed), it would still use the DC as the DNS server (ofc if it's setup this way) ?
Best Answer
It will dish out an IP address and DNS server addresses to any computer on the same broadcast domain (ie. any contiguous network infrastructure not separated by a router). You would not need to configure a static IP before you joined a computer to the domain. See also: How does a computer obtain an IP address via DHCP?
The advantage of running DHCP on a domain controller is that AD, DNS, and DHCP integrate very well together. DHCP will update the computer's name and IP in DNS, and it will replicate to all of the other DC/DNS servers in your organization. However, it would also make sense to run DHCP on a network device (to me, this would make the most sense since receiving an IP address is network-related), but I don't know if this would have any shortcomings versus running it in an AD/DNS environment.