DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. Managing DNS from the Command Line

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”

Knowledgeable administrators can perform tasks much faster using command-line tools than with graphical tools, such as the DNS console. Fortunately for us, Microsoft has steadily improved in this area, and the DNS command-line tools available with Windows Server 2003 are just as rich in features as the DNS console. In fact, many query and configuration tasks can be done only with a command-line tool.

Another benefit of understanding how to use command-line tools is that you can create batch scripts that automate repetitive processes. In this chapter, we will show you how easy it is to create a simple batch script that installs the Microsoft DNS Server, configures some name server settings, adds a zone, creates a resource record, and toasts some bread. All right, maybe it can’t toast bread, but you get the idea. And don’t worry if scripting isn’t your cup of tea; Windows batch scripts, in their most basic form, contain nothing more than a list of commands to execute. Our script is a little more complicated than that, but not much.

Throughout this book we’ve shown you how to configure a Microsoft DNS Server using the DNS console. The command-line counterpart to the DNS console is dnscmd, which is available in the ...