[70-642] Stub zones

Hey guys,

I was just playing around on my virtual machines, in preparation for 70-642, when I noticed something about stub zones.

Let's say you have 2 dns servers and a single client computer.
Server 1 has a single primary forward lookup zone, and server 2 has a secondary forward lookup zone. Neither of them are a part of a domain.
Everything is great, client computer goes to those 2 computers for the zone they're responsible for, and to the internet for everything else.

Now, let's say the company you work for acquires a business that already has its own dns server, and you want to keep it that way. Sure, you'll move the server to your main office, change the IP settings, yada yada yada, but keep everything else the same.

To save a bit of traffic from going outside your network when looking up dns records that the *new* server holds, you decide to create a stub zone.

Now that I've set the scene for you guys, my first question is:

Is it normal that I have to manually set the name server IP address for all newly created forward lookup zones? That is, if I want to create a working stub zone for it on another server.

Here's the zone transfer page, just in case you're wondering.

And here's how the stub zone looks like on the dns server that's set as primary on the client computer.

And my second question is: Isn't it supposed to have a single A record for the name server? Because then I wouldn't have to edit the name server list on the authoritative server for that zone, I think.

Hope this all makes a bit of sense. Thanks!

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Comments

Essendon

From what I can gather from your description, I'd just have a conditional forwarder on server1 pointing to server3 for the classroom zone. That way you dont have to worry about zone transfers choking network bandwidth. You can also have server1 host a secondary zone for classroom and that's where you configure the zone transfers tab, not when you configure stubs. If you have zone transfers, they will create network traffic. Hope this helps!

P.S. It's good you are labbing this out, makes a lot of sense when you actually do it.

spd3432

Haven't dealt much with stub zones except in lab environment. I don't remember ever getting an 'A' record since the stub zone dynamically updates (if transfers configured correctly) name server information only whenever the name servers change. If you can, add another name server to classroom.com then check your stub zone on the first machine. You should see both name servers listed but no 'A' records.

sean

mwaterloo

Thanks for replying, guys!

Essendon,
Conditional forwarders are great, but unlike stub zones, they're static. Although if you're the one administering all the dns servers in question, then it doesn't matter if it's static or dynamic, because you're in control of the name server list.

And I don't think that stub zones eat that much bandwidth? They're only updating SoA and NS records. Secondary zone, on the other hand, would take up a lot of bandwidth if the updates are not incremental.

spd3432,
I'll definitely try it out. Cheers.