Zone delegation and DNS behaviour.

[kstarr]

I have a single Windows 2000 domain forest (abc.com - for illustration) and delegating a child domain (child.abc.com - for illustration). DNS at the child level is configured to point to themselves and forward to the Root. However, forwarding from soem sites is not practical as they have their own acces to the internet. I am creating secondary zones on these child DNS servers for the root zone (abc.com). The zone loads properly, but when the DNS service is restarted or the server is rebooted, the zone is lost. I only see this on child DCs and not member servers.
Thanks in advance for your responses.

 

[ricpinto]

When the zone lost does it comes back after awhile or you have to re-create again?

 

[GlenJohnson]

Anything in the event logs, any error messages?

Glen A. Johnson
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Wanting to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884

 

[kstarr]

Hello All,

Thanks for your responses to this thread. The issue has been resolved - The root cause was that the root (abc.com - for illustration)AD intergrated zone was creating an empty copy of the zone folder in the system/microsoftdns at the child level (child.abc.com - for illustration), but this same folder is populated at the root level (as it should be). Found this and deleted it, it replicated and we were able to recreate a standard secondary zone of the root zone on the child DCs without losing it after a reboot or restart of the DNS service. The fix makes sense, since it only occurs on DCs and not member server.
The questions posed to MS now is;
1. Should the AD integrated root zone be replicated to a delegated child domain, and if so, why is it not populated like the copy at the root level.
2. If the above is not the case, why did it replicate in the first place.
3. If either of the above is true, how does it affect a standard secondary zone that should not be reloding the zone information from AD, but from its zone file.
4. If all of the above is answered or not - is this a bug in win2k, as I have heard that it is fully replicated in win2k3 (have not tested it yet).

For the answers to the questions posed from other contributors:

1. When this occurs, there are no event logs - you see DNS information logs showing that the zone information was received after the intitial creation, but there even tlogs when the zone is lost.
2. The zone does not reappear after it is lost, but the zone file remains in system32\DNS, which is the troubling aspect of the issue.

Note: Will provide the answers as I get them. Thanks again for your responses.