Hosts functionality through DNS 1

[JoeMiller]

I just put up my Windows 2000 Active Directory Server and am having a little problem with SOME name resolution. Due to my location, I have to use Dial-Up for access to the internet. I put modems in my server and setup ICS to share with clients, which works great.

The problem I have is that I named my internal server the same as my internet domain. I have a web site which is hosted by another company, and that same company hosts my mail. I can't reference my web site or my mail server by their friendly name because my new Active Directory Server can't find them for clients because it's looking at itself to do the resolution and not going out across the modems to my ISP's nameserver. If I place an entry in the hosts file on the client for my mail server, I can get through to the internet servers using the friendly names.

My question is how do I tell my 2000 server to look at my ISP's name server when a certain name is requested by my clients. I don't want to maintain the hosts file on all my clients so that these two domains can be resolved. I'm sure this is an easy think but as I'm new to 2000 Server i don't know where to go!

Joe Miller
joe.miller@flotech.net

 

[peterve]

try to add a NS record in your DNS server, and let it point to the ISP name server for that specific domain Peter Van Eeckhoutte
peter.ve@pandora.be

 

[JoeMiller]

Thanks Peter, that did the trick! Joe Miller
joe.miller@flotech.net

 

[hfrazier69]

I have the same scenario. Unfortunately I am not familiar with DNS, but am learning due to W2K Server. Please excuse the rookie question:

What is a NS record and how does one add it under 2000 Server's DNS to point to unresolved names on another (external) host?

Thanks for your help.

Holt Frazier
holt@lighting-technologies.com

 

[JoeMiller]

NS = Name Server. Go into DNS in Administrative Tools of your server providing DNS to network. Go into Forward Lookup Zones\YourDomain.Com. Double-Click on the Name Server of YourDomain.Com, add the name server of your ISP there.

HTH Joe Miller
joe.miller@flotech.net

 

[peterve]

suppose you've installed your Windows 2000 domain, using mydomain.com as the domain name.
But you've registered mydomain.com on the internet as well, you are running a website (on a server at the ISP) and a mailserver.
What does this mean :
You will have a DNS server with a bunch of hosts (for mydomain.com) AND the ISP will have a DNS server hosting mydomain.com as well.
If you are trying to resolve

http://www.mydomain.com

on your servers, it will not return an ip address (because this record will be registered on the ISP's DNS server)
If you add a NS record in the mydomain.com forward lookup zone, and enter the name of the name server (DNS server) of your ISP, you will be able to resolve the

http://www.mydomain.com

as well.
(because, when your local DNS server isn't able to resolve a certain query, it will try to look it up in the server specified in your NS record)

Is this clear enough ?
Peter Van Eeckhoutte
peter.ve@pandora.be