DNS as a Service Location Broker
By now you probably want to hear more about how Active Directory makes use of DNS. At the beginning of the chapter, we dropped the little nugget that when DNS is not available, Active Directory clients may fail to log in. The reason for this is that Active Directory clients use DNS as a service location broker, that is, to find the closest server that is providing a certain Active Directory service. Prior to Active Directory, Windows clients used NetBIOS and WINS to find domain controllers, but hosts running Windows 2000 and later use DNS.
Consider the case of a Windows XP Professional host at Movie U. that’s been joined to the movie.edu Active Directory domain. When this system boots up, it sends a series of DNS SRV record queries to its configured name server to find the closest domain controller for the movie.edu domain.
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