labs for DNS ? (70-640)

neilperry

Labbing is the best way for me to get my arms around something. Technet has been a good resource for labs/step by step guides especially for Certificate Services, RMS and Federation Services. Technet has a pretty thorough explanation of DNS which is helpful but I don't think it has a lab.

How did everyone go about labbing for the DNS portion of the 70-640? I feel like I can read about subjects all day but labbing is where it all clicks for me.

EV42TMAN

I had an extra computer(Core2quad),cheap d-link router, and some extra nic cards so i set up a lab environment on that system using hyper-v. so i made a completely separate lab environment for my Server 2008 Labs. it was a little sluggish since i was powering 6 VMs total on 4GBs and SATA one hard drive. but it worked.

cruwl

I setup 2 labs for DNS. I was hit pretty hard on my first attempt of the test by DNS. So I feel you on the labbing part.

Lab 1 was a non AD-Integrated DNS setup. I created 3 stand alone DNS servers, Set one as the primary for the Zone, and the other 2 were secondary DNS servers. Configured the zone transfers, played around in powershell and the CMD line manually adding entries ect.

Lab 2 was my AD-DS lab, which for me consists of about 12 DCs, in 4 different sites, 2 forests, with domains/subdomains. most all of these were DNS servers as well. Setup conditional forwards, Stub zones, forwarder, again played with power shell, and CMD line ect.

I basically went through the DNS chapters in each of my books and made sure i labbed out each section on each of the 2 labs.

Hope this gives you some ideas to lab out on your own.

Lunchbocks

I am working on DNS right now. I also have two networks of three servers each inside a VMware server. I am following the labs in the MS Self-Paced Training book for starters. Second, I am going through the DNS section in Technet and following their step-by-step guide for each section. You can look here for a start: DNS Server

Hope this helps.