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A checklist of mine calls for disabling SMHNR within Windows in order to reduce/eliminate DNS leaks. On Windows 10 Pro, this is done via gpedit, shown in the image below. x

However, the option doesn't seem to exist in Windows 10 Home as I've discovered recently. Does Windows 10 home have SMHNR? If so, can it be disabled? enter image description here

Online resources seem to echo each other (separate links), giving me an impression that no one actually checked on Windows 10 Home.

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Does Windows 10 home have SMHNR?

Yes.

If so, can it be disabled?

Yes.

Windows 10 users and admins may set a policy however to turn the feature off.

Specifies that a multi-homed DNS client should optimize name resolution across networks. The setting improves performance by issuing parallel DNS, link local multicast name resolution (LLMNR) and NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) queries across all networks. In the event that multiple positive responses are received, the network binding order is used to determine which response to accept. Note that the Group Policy Editor is only available in professional editions of Windows 10. Windows 10 Home users may want to check out Policy Plus that introduces policy editing to Home editions of Windows 10.

  1. Do the following to open the Group Policy Editor in Windows: Tap on the Windows-key on the keyboard, type gpedit.msc, and hit the Enter-key on the keyboard.
  2. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > DNS Client > Turn off smart multi-homed name resolution.
  3. Set the policy to enabled, to disable the smart multi-homed name resolution feature of the system.

If you enable this policy setting, the DNS client will not perform any optimizations. DNS queries will be issued across all networks first. LLMNR queries will be issued if the DNS queries fail, followed by NetBT queries if LLMNR queries fail.

(emphasis mine)

Source: Turn off smart multi-homed name resolution in Windows - gHacks Tech News

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  • I've linked that article and several others, and also attached a screenshot (Top: W10 Pro; Bottom: W10 Home). That setting does not exist, both in Policy Plus and vanilla gpedit.
    – Aloha
    Commented Sep 27, 2020 at 15:18
  • @PNDA Did you follow this advice? "The developer of the program notes that some administrative templates are present on Home editions of Windows by default, but that many are missing. Home edition administrators should download the latest policy files using the Help > Acquire ADMX Files option of the program. This downloads the latest file natively and adds the policies to it."
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Commented Sep 27, 2020 at 15:22
  • Whoa, I have not. I'll try that out and report back. Thanks for pointing that out!
    – Aloha
    Commented Sep 27, 2020 at 15:25
  • Acquire ADMX Files was indeed necessary. It made the same registry changes as in Windows 10 Pro
    – Aloha
    Commented Sep 28, 2020 at 4:22

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