Friday, February 27, 2015

Understanding Microsoft Windows DNS

If you are unfamiliar with managing Microsoft DNS, it is a bit of a learning curve to get up to speed on exactly what DNS accomplishes and how to use it appropriately in the management of your Microsoft networks.

First of all, a DNS Zone is a set of DNS records used to resolve domain name resources related to a domain (such as microsoft.com or google.com).


The types of DNS Records are the following:

  • SOA - Start of Authority:  Holds information about the nameservers that are authoritative for a zone as well as how long the records are cached (the TTL).
  • NS - Name Server: Identifies all the servers that hold records for a specific zone
  • A - Host: Provides Host name to IPv4 address resolution
  • PT - Pointer: Resolves IP Address to Host Name
  • CNAME - Alias: Creates an Alias or alternate DNS for a specified host name
  • SRV - Service Locator:  Points to specific services that are needed within Active Directory
  • MX - Mail Exchanger: Allow mail servers to be able to identify servers that are responsible for handling mail for a remote domain.

In most instances, you will either be creating either A or CNAME records for your Active Directory instances.

If you have a computer/server that has more than IP Address, you will probably need to create an A record to point to that specific IP Address.  This will most likely be needed in scenarios where you are hosting multiple web sites on a single web server and you have a requirement for SSL certificates which require unique IP Addresses.

If you have a computer/server that only has a single IP Address and you simply want to be able to access content on the server from a variety of friendly domain name entries, then you will likely need to create a CNAME record.  For example, if the name of your web server is called DEV, but you want to specify a more user friendly Url to access the website, you might provide a CNAME record such as sharepoint-dev.mydomain.com or aspnet-dev.mydomain.com.  This will allow your end users to understand what type of server they are accessing without having to physically change the name of the server to accommodate this.








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