DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Outages

Power outages, for example, are relatively common in many parts of the world. In some parts of the U.S., thunderstorms or tornadoes may cause a site to lose power or have only intermittent power for an extended period. Elsewhere, typhoons, volcanoes, or construction work may interrupt electrical service. And you never know when those of you in California might lose power in a rolling blackout from a lack of electrical capacity.

If all your hosts are down, of course, you don’t need name service. Quite often, however, sites have problems when power is restored. Following our recommendations, they run their name servers on file servers and big, multiuser machines. And when the power comes up, those machines are naturally the last to boot—because all those disks need to be checked and fixed first! Which means that all the on-site hosts that are quick to boot do so without the benefit of name service.

This can cause all sorts of wonderful problems, depending on what services your hosts access when they boot. For example, your PCs may mount your servers’ drives (via net use) when they boot. If they do, they almost certainly specify the servers’ domain names or NetBIOS names.

Using hostnames in commands is admirable because it allows administrators to change the servers’ IP addresses without changing all the startup files on-site. However, if name service isn’t available when your PCs boot, the net use command will fail, which may cause successive commands to fail, too. This will ...