Question
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Topic
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DNS Confusion
LockedI recently yanked an old NT 4.0 PDC out of a client’s office and replaced it with a brand new W2K3 server. I rejoined all the workstations to the new domain and copied the DHCP settings.
While configuring the DHCP, I had 2 DNS entries pushed to the clients: one was the IP of the new internal DC and one was the ISPs DNS server.
Lo and behold, I started having random user issues… mostly hovering around my two W2K SQL servers. Mainly “database not found” errors. A quick reboot generally corrected the issue. After a few days of trying to figure this one out, I happened to be at a problem workstation and pinged the SQL server by name. I was amazed to see that the “reply not found” IP address was coming from the web site hoster’s domain.
I have removed the ISP DNS server from DHCP, and for good measure also added ‘A’ records on the hoster’s NS for my servers.
I originally added the ISP DNS server because I have had clients that complained that some web sites did not come up and also a general slowness experienced finding sites on the internet. I have the ISP DNS servers set as Forwarders, but why would the internal DNS server be so slow that user PCs jump over to the secondary DNS entry? I’m only talking about a 40 user network. Are there any hidden settings I’m missing? Or is MS DNS just that slow?
On this particular client, the NT 4.0 domain was simply called “ABC”. The new W2K3 domain is, of course “ABC.com”. I suspect the outgoing troublesome DNS request was for “SQL1.ABC.com”, rather than “SQL1”. What is the best practice to avoid these issues in the future?
