asked on

What happens if I delete all of my DNS A and PTR records?

I have a slew of duplicate entries in my DNS on both of my domain controllers. Lots of A records for the same IP address in the forward lookup zone, and lots of PTR records for the same IP address in the reverse lookup zone. It looks like some of the entries have been there as long as the network has been in existence. I have it set up to scavenge records after 7 days, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything.

What happens if I just delete all of the A and PTR records from these zones? Will they regenerate gracefully? Or will I bring my network to a crashing, grinding halt?

LBizzle

You will bring computer browsing on your network to a grinding halt for the most part. Besides enabling the scaveging which is a good idea (set it to whatever your DHCP lease time is +1 day). Then, do a force scavenge (right click on DNS server in the MCC and scavenge stale resource records, then give it a couple of 4 hours) after that it's a manual process for the most part; there are tools out there but if you sort by IP address and remove any you know are duplicates (beware of aliases purposely using the same IP address, hopefully you or another admin would have created them and know better and USUALLY only applies to servers or web\Intranet addresses).

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Chris Dent

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

J-J-White

ASKER

Thanks for an exceptional answer. :)