Can I tell Windows to only dynamically register A records in DNS and not PTRs?

Question

We have 2 DNS domains:

• example.com, and various in-addr.arpa zones hosted by our ISP. Dynamic updates are not allowed.
• example.local and various in-addr.arpa zones for our private networks, hosted internally and used for AD, dynamic updates configured and working just fine.

Some of our Windows servers are located at a hosting datacentre and are using public IP addresses. When these servers attempt to update their PTR records dynamically, the attempts fail because the ISP's DNS does not allow it, and an informational event is logged.

These servers happily update their A records in example.local and we maintain the example.com and PTR records manually via the ISP.

Is there some registry hack that I can use to tell these servers to only register the relevant A records and not PTR records, so that they will stop logging redundant informational events in the event log?

Answer 1

Yes, you can edit a registry key on the servers themselves to tell them not to register ptr records, you can find it here:

 SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

The registry key is

DisableReverseAddressRegistrations

Set it to 1 to not register PTR records, 0 to turn it back on.

Usual Registry editing warnings apply