Definition for Delegation and Stub-Zone

jescab

Can anyone give a good explanation of Delegation and Stub-Zone, please? Also when to use them.

agustinchernitsky

Delegation: you own contoso.com zone. Next morning your company opens a branch office in Argentina. The domain for the branch office will be ar.contoso.com and you want the network admins in Arg to manage that domain. -> Delegate ar.contoso.com to the DNS servers in Argentina, where the network admins have full control of the zone.

Stub zones: contoso.com and techexams.net do a jointventure. techexams.net modifies its NS servers often and they also add new ones. Your least administrative effort solution to provide a quick resolution of techexams.net is to create a stub zone that points to one of their dns.

The stub zone reads the NS records of the other domain and keeps that updated.

Danman32

Stub zones are often used in conjunction with delegated zones. This way the server(s) holding the parent zone will have references to the NSs for the delegated zone, since the delegate could add additional servers.

agustinchernitsky

Well, it depends on what you want to do...

If you want to do the "less admin effort" -> Stub zone instead of deleation... Wasn't there a difference on the authority result that the DNS responded? I think that for stubs, it was a non-auth and for delegated an authorative response... or the other way round??

Also, with stub zones you can shorten the name resolution paths:

Rootdomain----------------------------
|                                     |
SubA----------------                 SubB-----------
|         |         |                  |           |
|         |         |                  |           |
Subc    subD      subE                 subF        subG

If you are in subF.subB.root you can speed up resolutions by creating a stub zone to SubE domain.

Danman32

A zone copy designated as the type stub will only contain name server records pointing to servers that had the actual zone data. The stub zone actively updates the NS records within itself as new authoritive name servers are added.

Think of stub zones as reference zones with automatic updates.

Delegated zones also can be thought of as reference zones, but they are static. They are more like placeholders.

shamrocker98

http://support.microsoft.com/servicedesks/webcasts/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/servicedesks/webcasts/en/wc012103/manifest.xml

I recommend watching this webcast. I just watched this yesterday. It's very throrough and makes it easier to visualize everything. It takes about 45 minutes for the presentation and another 45 minutes for the q&a. Enjoy!