MaSSSoftech

the concept of DNS and, perhaps more importantly, how to manage it in an organization. We looked at a number of ways of keeping your thumb on DNS.

The first way we looked at was simply the Monitor tab of your DNS server properties dialog box. The main use of this tab is to perform some queries against your DNS servers. You can perform either recursive or iterative queries against your servers (remember those?)

The next tool we looked at was NSLOOKUP. NSLOOKUP is a command line tool and uses reverse lookup zones (remember those?) to lookup your name servers, hence the name. We discussed the various things you can do with NSLOOKUP, and instead of rehashing them here, check out this link to get more information.

The next tool we looked at was a powerful DNS tool called DNSLint. This tool is available from the Windows Support Tools and is used to do some advanced DNS troubleshooting. Depending in which options we use with the command, we can do various things. For example, running dnslint /d boston.contoso.com will test the boston.contoso.com domain to ensure that it has proper DNS connectivity. Again, TechNet has more information here.

Next up, we looked at the DNSCMD command, which can be used to directly manipulate the DNS database. If, for example, I want to insert a Host (A) record pointing traffic aimed at mailserver.contoso.com to 10.1.5.1 I would type in this from the command prompt:

dnscmd dnsserver.contoso.com /recordadd mailserver A 10.1.5.1

The last thing we discussed was Replication Monitor, which is launched simply by issuing the replmon command from the command prompt. This command allows us to ahem, monitor replication to discover any errors that might be happening.