DNS Settings for Automatic Configuration!

Today we are going to take a look at what are the neccessary settings that are needed to setup Automatic Configuration within our OCS 2007 (basic) enviroment.

Automatic Configuration enables users to be able to sign-in to communicator without needing to know specific server names and IP addresses.  This way the end user can just click "sign-in" for their communicator and life is good for them.  In the event that servers are replaced, users will not need to know the server to point to and this will make life easier on the administrator.

Let's jump right into it, I'm going to assume you already know how to setup the Standard and \ or Enterprise server at this point and we will just focus on the DNS entries that you are going to need to get automatic configuration up an running.

For our example we are going to make a couple of assumptions; those assumptions are we are deploying an Enterprise Edition server setup. There is no director in this scenario, just your single Enterprise Edition server, and our pool name is Poo1.Contoso.com

Required DNS Records:
• DNS SRV record for _sipinternaltls._tcp.contoso.com domain over port 5061 that maps to pool1.contoso.com
• DNS SRV record for _sipinternaltls._tcp. retail.contoso.com domain over port 5061 that maps to pool1.contoso.com (optional)
• DNS A host record for the pool FQDN (the "A" record should be the name of the pool)

 Note: Also keep in mind you must create DNS SRV records in your internal DNS for every SIP domain.

That's it! Now keep in mind that these are the basic DNS settings that are needed to deploy OCS 2007 with automatic configuration with an Enterprise Edition server or Standard Edition server.  We will take a look at creating DNS "SRV and "A" host records in a future blog.