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W2K DNS namespace and Internet Access

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by c.edwards 1 view

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I have recently migrated the PDC in the small domain (65 users, 3 sites) I manage to Windows 2000 and under the advice of this article: -

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/win2000/upgrnt.asp

I named the domain space after our Internet domain amphlettlissimore.co.uk .

This, it appears, is not the correct thing to do (according to further reading in the Resource Kit) and I should have chosen a domain name that we had registered but did not use on the public Internet. The amphlettlissimore.co.uk domain is hosted by our ISP, both the site and the DNS record. Now I have an internal private DNS server authorative for the same domain as our ISP has! This means we can't see our ISP hosted web space(which is undeveloped at present but won't be for much longer)! And I can't rename the domain either (apparrently this is not possible).

I know I could use PAQs etc., but I do not want to use proxies exclusively, although we have MS Proxy for web access caching only, because I want tobe free to have all sorts of protocols over the firewall and don't want to configure the proxy for all of each of these in turn.

In the resource kit it says that I can solve the problem by duplicting our external DNS records; does this just mean I just add A records in my DNS zone for the IPs of our ISP hosted servers? Is this enough, will this always resolve any ambiguity? What about dial in users, when they get our web servers IP address when connected directly to the Internet they will get it from our ISPs DNS server and when connected through us to the Internet they will get it from our DNS Server, does this matter?

I have already setup our servers to forward queries about domains other than amphlettlissimore.co.uk to our ISP'sDNS servers.

Help! This has already ruined my weekend.
Any knowledge shared appreciated, I'm not used to the added complexity of DNS, come back WINS all is forgiven!

3 replies

by ghurley

We administer a configuration with some of your characteristics: External (ISP) and internal (Microsoft NT 4.0 DNS Service) DNS servers being authoritative for the same DNS zone, however ours is not a windows 2000 environment.

By adding an A record to the zone in the internal DNS, whose IP address is that of the external web site, our internal users can access our external site. Other names are correctly resolved to addresses in our internal network.

If your clients will access your external site using the traditional "www" prefix (ie http://www.amphlettlissimore.co.uk), you can add an a record for "www" into your internal DNS zone, with the IP address of the external web site. The internal Windows 2000 domain should work fine, since it won't be using this "www" name.

If you need internal clients to be able to access the external web site without the www (ie http://amphlettlissimore.co.uk) you would haved to configure an A record for the amphlettlissimore.co.uk domain itself, again with the IP address of the external web site. The question is, will this conflict with any other records with that name, used internally by Windows 2000? I'm guessing it could work, since Windows 2000 may be relying on SVR type records (rather than A type records). There is generally no problem having different types of records with the same name but different IPs, e.g. MX records with IP addresses of mail servers do not conflict with A records for separate web servers sharing the same DNS name.

Inspection of your DNS zone (after the Windows 2000 DCs are up and running, after completing their dynamic DNS registrations) may reveal the answer.

Presumably the dial-up users will use the external DNS if they connectto the Internet, and the internal DNS if they make a RAS (dial-up or VPN) connection into your internal network, and either way they should access the resources correctly.

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