Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Active Directory Integrated DNS

If you've decided to host your AD DNS zones on your domain controllers, you should strongly consider using AD-integrated zones. This section will explain some of the benefits of using AD-integrated DNS versus standard primary zones.

Figure 6-5. Forwarders configuration screen in the Windows Server 2003 DNS MMC snap-in

Conditional Forwarding

Conditional forwarding is a new feature available in Windows Server 2003 that gives administrators much more flexibility in how forwarding is handled than was available under Windows 2000. Figure 6-4 shows the forwarders configuration screen in the Windows 2000 MMC snap-in. It allows you to set up one or more IP addresses to forward all requests that cannot be handled by the local DNS server. Figure 6-5 shows the same configuration screen, but on Windows Server 2003. As you can see, we configured forwarding based on the domain name being queried:

• If the query is for foobar.com , forward to 10.1.1.1.

• If the query is for example.com , forward to 10.1.2.1.

• If the query is for any other zone, forward to 10.1.3.1.

Conditional forwarding allows you to create a more efficient resolution topology, particularly for corporate networks using disjointed namespaces, by sending queries directly to servers responsible for the individual zones instead of using only recursive queries to the Internet.

In the normal world of DNS, you ...