Sometimes it is the simplest things that get you.  I was asked to troubleshoot a system that would not register into DNS after a domain migration. The system could ping its new gateway and the new DNS servers–telnet showed access to the new DNS boxes on port 53 and name resolution was functioning correctly other than the fact that the system would not register itself in DNS.

Trying to force registration from the command line with

ipconfig /registerdns

yielded no positive results.  Matter of fact it yielded no results at all in Event Viewer.  Strange at the very least it should show errors. Okay lets break-out wireshark and see what happening…

Setup wireshark, issued ipconfig /registerdns and capture indicated that we were not sending any DNS queries out from our server.  Very strange, so lets take a closer looks at our NIC and see if we missed something.

Drilling down to Advanced TCP/IP Settings and in the DNS settings tab we found our culprit. Someone had unchecked the “Register this connection’s address in DNS” check-box.  So even if we issued the command manually to force DNS registration

ipconfig /registerdns

the NIC was ignoring it.  Appears that in this instance the GUI setting overrides our command line process.