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sammydlc

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DNS Corect Setup on Active Directory

I recently started experiencing some problems after one of my DNS server crashed. I have a network with 500 worskstations and I have 8 DC servers running at each of my subnets.
When my Primary DC crashed at my main site, all workstations stoped resolving when trying to get to my internet.
All of our internet traffic goes out from our main site and since that DC had the Forward Pointers to external DNS all the rest of my DNS servers could not rsolve for them
All my DNS are active-directory integrated.
My question is ; do I have to setup Forwarders on all my DNS to use external ISP dns?
Also I noticed that even thought all my workstations had a secondary DNS they did not use it to resolve.
Any help is greatly appreciated
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dpm2009

You should just need to setup your Primary DC's DNS settings to your external DNS.  While all local dns requests can point to the primary DC....
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Yes, it's best to setup the forwarders to your ISP's DNS on all DNS servers; otherwise the servers will by default use the root hints to resolve external lookups. Were your additional DCs pointing to your main DC as forwarder, and/or could there be any firewall issues on the additional DCs?
And how did you check whether your machines weren't using the secondary DNS?
Are your additional DCs Global Catalogs?
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ASKER

Ok, I just modified that. Now all my Dcs have Forwarders to External ISP DNS.
Yes some of my DNS servers had only my Main DNS listed on theyr external forwarders. They had not external DNS. i do not think we have a firewall issue because I was able to ping fine internally if I did it manually. All my remaining DNS servers responded fine when I pinged them.

As for the workstations not able to use the secondary DNS i verified that the workstation had a DHCP address assigned. when I did an ipconfig I saw that my primary DNs was the server that had crased.
My secondary DNS was a server that was operational except it was on a different subnet than where my stations were. When I pinged an internal name I got a response. When I pinged an external name I did not get a response.
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oBdA

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OK everything is working ok except that my secondary DNs is still not resolving.
I tested because one of my stations has the Crashed DNS as primary DNS and my Working DNS as 2nd.

If I ping by name I am still  not resolving.

If I move my working DNS to primary and ping by name, I get a response.
Am I missing something on DNs configuration>?
Secondary DNS is now responding. I guess it just needed some time to start responding. Now if I have my working DNs as Secondary Even 3rd I can resolve without problems.