Now-a-days many people use VPN and pay a lot of money to get high quality VPN service. A good VPN shield your IP address from the internet and protects your privacy. But even if you are using a VPN and not making some changes to your web browser or operating system settings then your real IP address is still exposed to the remote servers.
For example, if you are using a VPN plugin in your web browser and have not disabled WebRTC then your public IP address could still be leaked. Similarly, if you are using Windows 10 or Windows 11 and have not turned off a DNS resolution setting then your IP address could still be detected.
On Windows 11 PC, we can turn off this DNS related setting in the following manner:
- Press Win+R hotkey to open the Run dialog.
- In the Run dialog, type gpedit.msc and press Enter.
- When Group Policy Editor opens, select Computer Configuration, then Administrative Templates, then Network, and then DNS Client.
- On the right-side of the Policy Editor, find the setting named Turn off smart multi-homed name resolution. Double-click on it to open its properties.
- In the Properties window, select Enabled and then click on the OK button.
- Close Group Policy Editor
However, you can open Group Policy Editor only on Windows 11 Pro edition. It won’t work on the Home edition of Windows. For the Home edition, you can manually add this policy in the Registry Editor in the following manner:
- Press Win+R to open Run dialog, enter Regedit in the Run dialog to launch Registry Editor.
- In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\DNSClient. If this key does not exist then create it.
- Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named DisableSmartNameResolution and change its value to 1.
- Close Registry Editor and restart Windows.
So these are two methods using which a Windows 11 user can easily disable the DNS related smart name resolution feature. By disabling this feature, we ensure that VPN can completely hide our real IP address.