Sunday, January 02, 2005

Three DNS Server Configuration Roles

There are three DNS server configuration roles:
  • Caching-only server
  • Primary server
  • Secondary server

A single DNS server can play multiple roles.

All DNS servers maintain a cache.dns file that contains a list of all Internet root server. Any time a DNS server resolves a hostname to an IP address, the info is added to the cache file.

Caching-only server. Caching-only servers do not contain any zone info. The main purpose of a caching-only server (other than providing name resolution) is to build the cache file as names are resolved. So either hostnames are resolved from the cache or else another DNS server is required to resolve them. Caching-only servers are useful when there are remote locations that have slow-WAN links.

Primary server. A primary DNS server hosts a working (writable) copy of a zone file. A single DNS server can be the primary DNS server for multiple zones.

Secondary server. A secondary DNS server gets its zone info from a master DNS server. The secondary DNS server hosts a read-only copy of the zone file, which it gets from the primary server or another secondary server. Both Win2k and Win2003 support incremental zone transfers. A server can be both a primary and a secondary server at the same time. Secondary servers provide the following benefits:

  • Fault tolerance
  • Reduction in name-resolution traffic
  • Load balancing

Notes are taken from the following book

Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure

3 Comments:

At 10:15 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

There are also derivatives of primary and secondary servers. A common one is the blind primary, in which the primary owns the writable zone file, however, the secondary is listed in the zone file as the SOA and primary NS. This is useful if you want to have your ISP host DNS traffic, but, you want to administer the zone file on your corporate DNS server. This avoids having to go through your ISP's hostmaster to make zone file changes. It also obscures where the zone file lives (which is not overly useful).

 
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