DNS Root Hints and Forwarders

A post in the Yahoo group mssmallbiz asked an interesting question:  when DNS Forwarders are configured under SBS 2003, is there a way to get the secondary nameserver to automatically take over when the primary is unavailable?

Don’t Use Forwarders

The answer was simple:  don’t use forwarders. Go to Start > Administrative Tools > DNS, go into the Properties for the server, go to the Forwarders tab, and click Remove until they are gone.

Do Use Root Hints

Then make sure the root hints are up to date. The poster suggested using Windows Update. I didn’t see root hints there, but I found a simple way to refresh them:  in the DNS Properties, go to the Root Hints tab, click on Copy from Server, and enter 4.2.2.2 as the IP address to copy the hints from.

Posters seemed to think that relying solely on root hints is actually faster for resolving external DNS queries.

The instructions work for Windows Server 2003 as well as SBS 2003!

Update:  copying root hints from 4.2.2.2 doens’t work. See this post for details and a solution.

3 thoughts on “DNS Root Hints and Forwarders

  1. Sridhar

    Hi this is Sridhar .
    I am a network engg for my org and my network is running with 2 AD Server 1 DHCp Server and 1 DNS server .
    and we have airtel broadband and a a proxy server .now i want to remove my proxy and i want my DNS to act like a proxy .that is i want all my clients to access internet throu the local DNS Server .and how to implement this using DNS Delegatgion … please help me

  2. Mark Berry

    On the DHCP server, set the first DNS server value to point to your DNS server. Then when the clients get IP info from the DHCP server, they will use your DNS server to retrieve DNS entries. Of course the DNS server has to be correctly configured to get _its_ DNS entries from the Internet.

  3. yogender

    I want to know the uses of Dhcp vendour class and user class. how these are helpful for me and how can i configure these classes

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.