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DNS question

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by tindog

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Our company has a public website hosted by a web hosting company. In the domain settings for our domain ("company.com"), the DNS settings point to the web hosting company's DNS servers.

We now want to establish an Active Directory environment, so we'll be setting up our own DNS servers on our LAN and will be creating a corporate domain called CORP.COMPANY.COM, which will contain all our users and computers. We plan on leaving the public website on the web hosting company's servers instead of moving it inhouse.

My question is, do I leave the DNS settings for "company.com" the same in the WHOIS database or do I point it back to our internal DNS servers and then create a host record in our internal DNS servers that point to the web hosting servers?

3 replies

by lcampbell

you should keep your DNS internal. All clients should point to your internal DNS server. Or routing will not happen internally. As for the website, you should be able to do nothing as it is already registered with your hosting company as a domain name/IP and even your internal users should be able to hit it be simply going out the gateway to the internet...same as anyone else external hits it.

by r3d

...Also, if it comes into your company and there is a problem, I wish you the best of luck trying to get the host to fix it without saying, "it's your fault", and, "go check your DNS".

Good luck!

-R3D

by chris..

1. Why create a child domain? corp.mycompany.com .. don't get that design and wish to GOD that MS wouldn't teach it like that.

2. Who is the SOA? If you've given SOA to the hosting company, you'll need to change that with the registar service you used to reg the domain name.

Suggestions...

mycompany.AD or Corp or fartknocker ... the reason I say this is that AD does not require RFC compliant top level domain extensions.

When I design em' I keep the name and add .ad or .corp. The primary reason is to avoid confusion with DNS, e-mail etc. So I'll have an outside domain name of mycompany.com and an inside of mycompany.ad

Personally I'm all about keeping it as simple as possible, especially in my naming conventions.. the .AD reminds me that it is the Active Directory zone and that way I don't do something REALLY stupid to it.

You'll need two DNS zones for the example I'm goiing to give here; if you're going to host the "real" domain on the same server as the internal one you'll have to have a second NIC (OK well not really, but it is a REAL good idea to have the second NIC rather than just assigning the IP to the primary NIC in addition to it's internal IP) and punch a hole in your FW to foward DNS calls to that server. A better practice is to have 2 DNS servers, inside and outside. Neither has to be dedicated or real ballzy .. but you'll find DDNS functions rather well when it's run from a DC rather than a member server.

The outside server can be of what ever flavor you wish, the internal server should have a fowarder pointing to the external server so that all resolutions that are not part of the internal zone go out first to a server you manage, then up the root hints line.

damn I hate DNS

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