I work in mid-sized department in a university. We’ve just recently gone to an Active Directory infrastructure, and I’ve gotten all of the desktops on the domain with little trouble. The laptops are more of a puzzle, however.
We get our IP configuration through DHCP. The university IT department controls the DHCP settings, but there isn’t a way for them to make a special entry for our machines to point to our domain’s DNS controller, so we’ve had to hardcode the DNS information in the network settings. This is fine on desktops, but it won’t do on laptops that can be taken from the office and may still need to work on a physical network elsewhere. Cached credentials I can handle (each machine has only one user). Changing a static, hardcoded DNS setting to a dynamic DHCP-assigned one on the fly is a bit more problematic.
Thus far I’ve considered getting USB NICs for office use, allowing for one physical network device when in the office, and the other, built-in, device when off, but that’ll cost a little bit of money (albeit only about $25×12). Before I go to anyone with such a purchase recommendation, however, I wanted to see if there isn’t a software solution, like maybe getting DNS settings from DHCP but in addition still somehow forcing Windows to use a specific statically defined DNS server in addition.