[Samba] DHCP, DNS and non-domain members

[Martin Renner]

Hi all,

I am preparing a migration from Samba NT-Domain to Samba AD. The migration itself is all fine, but I
have a general problem in understanding the network architecture of an active directory domain.

Right now (Samba NT style), each client gets its IP address from a DHCP server (isc-dhcp-server).
The DHCP server in turn updates the DNS (bind9) via dynamic DNS updates. This way, every client (and
more important in terms of DNS: several servers with dynamic IPs) can be found in the DNS - forward
and reverse.

Now with Samba AD, the Samba server has full and exclusive control over the DNS zone. Windows
clients and Linux clients, which have joined the domain, update the DNS zone with an entry
(apparently only forward but not reverse). But what should I do with clients and other servers,
which are not in the AD domain? Clients are not so important, but the servers have to be reached via
DNS :-)

I could deliver a fixed IP address via DHCP to the servers and manually create a DNS entry in the AD.

Or I could put them into a different DNS domain, which is not controlled by Samba, but by
isc-dhcp-server and bind. But then the clients would need two different domain search suffixes (not
so nice with Windows).

How do you solve this problem with DHCP and DNS entries for non-AD members?

Regards,
Martin