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Microsoft DNS

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by gnawrocki 1 view

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I have two Windows 2003 Active Directory Integrated DNS servers. Both are DC's. When the Primary DC is shut down I am unable to resolve DNS from my Windows XP workstation even though the other DC is set as my Secondary DNS server. The only way I can resolve DNS is to set my XP Secondary DNS server as Primary.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

I would like to be able to resolve DNS from my Secondary DNS server dynamically.

8 replies

by ccthompson

What pushes your IP address to your clients? Either the router or server pushes the address out, they can also push out the Primary DNS and Secondary DNS to the clients. Then you will not have to change them manually.

by gnawrocki

My DHCP server pushes out Primary and Secondary DNS servers to my clients. The problem is that my clients do not fail over to the seconday DNS server when the Primary is down.

by mwojo

Have you been able to resolve this yet. I noticed last week when we had our primary DNS server down none of our computers could resolve anymore even though they had a secondary DNS entry. I used nslookup to verify that our secondary could resolve addresses and it could but our workstations wouldn't switch over to the secondary.

by cg it

is your secondary DC delegated for redundancy for your DNS zone?

here's a technet article on delegating DNS server zones for redundancy.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/ee150296-9031-480b-a41d-e350d00882011033.mspx?mfr=true

and this article on secondary DNS servers

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/ee150296-9031-480b-a41d-e350d00882011033.mspx?mfr=true

note: DCs don't have to be DNS servers. In large networks DCs typically aren't DNS servers. however there must be a DNS server that is authoritative for the Active Directory namespace on the network for Active Directory to function properly.

if your combining DCs with DNS servers and want redundancy, delegate the namespace zone to the secondary DNS server.

after that, ask another question about redundant DHCP server if your DHCP server is also on the same server as your DNS and DCs.

by fguerrini

Depending on your client configuration is possible that you are resolving using WINs and not DNS. Is that primary DC a WINs server as well?
If you are using non-Fully Qualified Domain name (non-FQDN) and your clients don't have the correct domain suffixes configured, it may be possible that they are resolving names using WINS and not DNS so when your primary WINS server goes down, they can't resolve names because they are using non-FQDN and they don't have the correct domain suffixes.

Rgds,
Federico

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