DNS basics

Hi all, This post is just a quickie about the locations that you can use to store your DNS zone data, both standard and active directory integrated.

Standard Zones

 

Standard zones have all their information stored in text files on a DNS server. With standard zones you can only one primary copy of the database. Standard zones are also prone to failure as if the server hosting the primary zone fails then no updates/additions can be made to the zones which in a large domain/network with ddns enabled can quickly become a problem. The text files are generally named after the zone with .dns at the end for example a secondary zone for scrivnet.local would have its data saved on \system32\dns\scrivnet.local.dns . You can obviously use a normal text editor to view the contents of the files.

 

Active Directory Integrated Zones

Active Directory integrated zones do exactly what it says on the tin except with the added advantage that in this configuration you can have multiple servers with primary copies of the same zone data. The main thing to remember with this is that all the dns servers need to be domain controllers as well otherwise you cannot use integrated zones. Also secondary zones can never be integrated into active directory and can only be standard zones as above. Stub zones however can be integrated if you wish.