DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

Adding More Name Servers

When you need to create new name servers for your domain, the simplest recourse is to add slaves. You already know how—we went over it in Chapter 4—and once you’ve set up one slave, cloning it is a piece of cake. But you can run into trouble if you add slaves indiscriminately.

If you run a large number of slave servers for a zone, the primary master name server can take quite a beating just keeping up with the slaves’ polling to check that their zone data is current. There are a number of courses of action to take for this problem, as described in the sections that follow:

• Eliminate the slave name servers altogether by using Active Directory integration.

• Increase the refresh interval so that the slaves don’t check so often.

• Direct some of the slave name servers to load from other slave name servers.

• Create caching-only name servers.

• Create partial-slave name servers.

Active Directory Integration

We discuss this new feature for Windows 2000 in Chapter 11. Briefly, this feature eliminates the load on the primary master from slaves’ polling by eliminating the slaves! Remember that the main purpose of the primary master/slave relationship is zone data replication: the DNS designers created the zone transfer mechanism as a way to spread zone data among multiple authoritative name servers. Windows 2000 stores all kinds of information about the network in Active Directory and replicates this information, too. With Windows 2000, you have the option of storing the ...