DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

How to Become a Parent: Creating Subdomains

Once you’ve decided on names, creating the child domains is easy. But first, you’ve got to decide how much autonomy you’re going to give your subdomains. Odd that you have to decide that before you actually create them....

Thus far, we’ve assumed that if you create a subdomain, you’ll want to delegate it to another organization, thereby making it a separate zone from the parent. Is this always true, though? Not necessarily.

Think carefully about how the computers and networks within a subdomain are managed when choosing whether or not to delegate it. It doesn’t make sense to delegate a subdomain to an entity that doesn’t manage its own hosts or networks. For example, in a large corporation, the personnel department probably doesn’t run its own computers: the MIS (Management Information Systems) or IT (Information Technology—same animal as MIS) department manages them. So while you may want to create a subdomain for personnel, delegating management for that subdomain to them is probably wasted effort.

Creating a Subdomain in the Parent’s Zone

You can create a subdomain without delegating it, however. How? By creating resource records that refer to the subdomain within the parent’s zone.

Say one day a group of students approaches us, asking for a DNS entry for a web server for student home pages. The name they’d like is www.students.movie.edu. You might think that we’d need to create a new zone, students.movie.edu, and delegate to it from ...