Primary and Secondary DNS servers

[noodle786]

Hello,

I work for a company that hosts its own Name Servers. However, we also have our ISP as our secondary DNS. When I got to dnsreport.com to check the consistency of our domain, I receive a few errors stating that the ISP DNS servers are lame name servers. Now when I talk to our ISP, they told me that they are unable to connect to our primary name servers because the connection is rejected. I know I have to put an entry into the DNS of our servers for the IP of our ISP DNS servers, however I don't know how to do this. I have Windows 2003 Servers. Any help would be appreciated. Also, I am kind of confused about the whole hosting your own DNS, and using a secondary DNS host, etc., can someone explain that to me?

Thanks,
Nadya

 

[GlenJohnson]

I've not worked with W2K3, but with W2K, I've always listed on the local servers,
1)Local dns servers
2)ISP dns server

Then on my clients, I would list only local dns servers, so they would look locally for name resolution, and if the local dns server couldn't find it in the database, the local server would query the ISP, and then once the name resolution was done, the name resolution would be in the local name server database which allows the clients faster name resolution. Make sense?

Glen A. Johnson
"Give the laziest man the hardest job and he'll find the easiest way to do it."

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884

 

[hAkron]

If you have the DNS server behind a firewall, make sure that you are allowing UDP port 53 and TCP port 53 inbound to the DNS server. The secondary server will not be able to replicate the zone file if you only have UDP 53 open

 

[noodle786]

Thanks for the response. I'm new to this whole DNS thing (obviously), so I don't think I was clear in my first posting.

To clarify, I have Windows 2003 Server as my parent name server. I want my ISP to backup my parent name server (meaning I want them to be able to have a copy of my domain records if my parent name server goes down. Everytime my ISP Server tries to get the zone file from my parent server, the connection is refused by my parent server.


Now, my question is do I add a record to Active Directory to allow my ISP servers to connect into the server to copy the zone files? If yes, what type of record? Or do I change a specific file????

Please help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[GlenJohnson]

First, check with your isp and see if they want to do this. If you're worried about redundancy, check into throwing a cheap cache only dns server on your network. Good luck.

Glen A. Johnson
"Give the laziest man the hardest job and he'll find the easiest way to do it."

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at FAQ219-2884