We need to have our workstations register automatically in two DNS namespaces (i.e. aaa.com and bbb.com). Is there any way to accomplish this in DNS, by perhaps actively cloning one DNS zone to another, or forcing the workstations to register in more than one zone?

Do they actually have to be registered under both namespaces? or just be resolvable frome either namespace?

How many machines require this config (need to be resolvable both ways)? A few servers, a specific small segment, or the whole campus?

If anybody else asked this question I'd swear they were stoned...

...I'm assuming the Append DNS suffix feature won't cut it for some reason, Yes?


*Thinking Aloud* Sounds like this might be a good place for a stub zone.

Thanks for the response!

Heh, As is apparent I'm not a DNS guru. I set it up on our AD domain, and was supposed to immerse myself in it, but instead they handed me Exchange and MOSS and gave DNS to the network manager. It wasn't a good trade.

Here's the full scenario: we are transitioning our namespace, and currently our external facing namespace is one name, and our internal one is another. This is confusing to some of our users, so we want every computer to respond to both namespaces. They don't necessarily need to register, they just need to resolve, but they need to be set up to be listed in both namespaces automatically.

What we've come up with so far is to use DHCP option 15 to set a connection-specific DNS suffix. This registers the machine in both domains.

Can you explain a bit about stub zones? I've already passed the info on the the network manager, but I'd like to know a bit more about what you're thinking.

Hi illy,

It has been a while since i took my MCSE course on DNS DHCP and RAS. But this article seems to do a good job of explaining stub zones.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_...Stub_Zones.html

A stub zone is also read-only like a secondary zone, so administrators can't manually add, remove, or modify resource records on it. But the differences end here, as stub zones are quite different from secondary zones in a couple of significant ways.

First, while secondary zones contain copies of all the resource records in the corresponding zone on the master name server, stub zones contain only three kinds of resource records:

A copy of the SOA record for the zone.
Copies of NS records for all name servers authoritative for the zone.
Copies of A records for all name servers authoritative for the zone.

Ah ok, I wasn't sure if this was a straight namespace change issue, or a combining if two complete domains. The Stub Zone (doesn't apply) is only for the latter option so that name lookups can/will be forwarded to an ever changing group of NS in another domain/namespace.

DHCP option 15 I've never had to use (networks tend to be small here) but it appears to be the DHCP method of adding an appendable DNS suffix (manually (ick!)) to the advanced TCP/IP DNS properties.

It sounds like everything is working now, yes?

It looks like Option 15 is the only way to go. It's actually pretty easy to implement (set option 15, run a domain wide startup script that runs ipconfig /registerdns), although pre-populating the second table is going to be a pain the the ass.

Thanks for the input guys.