In a Windows 2003 domain, I would like to create a SRV record programmatically at install time to advertise to clients where my server is located.
Since I do not have the luxury of running as Domain Admin, what kind of permissions do I need to have to create the SRV record?
Generally I'd be using the .NET classes to create the SRV record. I just don't want to go down the wrong architectural path here.
Take a look at the System.Management-namespace. Here's blog post with a code sample to get you started.
Edit: Access Rights-related questions are problably best suited for serverfault.com but the quick answer is that there´s a built-in group in AD called DnsAdmins (in the Users-container). Members of this group have write access to DNS; so adding your service account to that group will allow your app to create SRV-records. (There's also the possibility of setting more explicit rights to DNS but that's a question for you domain admin to decide on. A compromised account which is a member of DnsAdmins can potentially cause a lot of security and reliability-related problems in the domain.)