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Setting Priority on MS Windows 2003 DNS

Hello,

I have a DC with DNS setup on a couple of my branches. I would like to know if it is possible to accomplish priority based name resolution.

I have right now a local web page set up using IIS that employees use on a daily basis. I would like to add mirror of that web page on a different site just in case of disaster.

What I would like to know is that can I accomplish DNS priority in this scenario ?

Todd Gerbert

No priority based resolution with Microsoft's DNS server (you might be able to find that functionality in another vendors DNS services, but that's probably not worth the hassle in an Active Directory environment).

You do have a couple options...

Manually update the DNS records in the event of a failure. (I bet you could find a utility or script to automate this, but I don't know of any off the top of my head).

Put two host records in DNS with the same name, and different IP addresses (e.g. www.yourdomain.com => 192.168.1.10 and www.yourdomain.com => 192.168.15.60). No guarantee which address will be used for any given query though, so may not be an option if you're running anything more than plain HTML files, like an interactive web application.

The third thing that comes to mind is something I've thought of, but haven't tested yet. In a properly setup Active Directory with a DC at each Site, yourdomain.local (or whatever your AD domain name is) should always resolve to the nearest domain controller. Though you still might run into issues with multiple copies of the web site running simultaneously, and it's generally considered a security no-no to run web sites on domain controllers.

Krzysztof Pytko

Please check this EE post I helped with
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/26852882/DNS-Host-A-Record-Different-Record-for-Each-Subnet.html

Follow this idea and it would work fine.

Regards,
Krzysztof

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Chris Dent

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