Troubleshooting Server 2008 R2 DNS

Question

I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 DNS server in our AD. Every now and again (sometimes once a week, sometimes three times a day) it will just stop resolving certain domain names. It is NOT a problem with caching TTL's for .uk and .eu TLDs. The records in question have a 30-minute TTL and are hosted with DNS Made Easy. Other domains on the same TLD work fine.

The solution to this is to just restart the DNS service and it all comes back online, but I need a more permanant solution.

Where is the best place to start debugging this? Does Windows DNS server have some tracing or debugging logs I can enable and study?

Answer 1

You can turn on some fairly verbose debugging in the properties sheets for the DNS server itself. It'll log each query received and the response sent to the client.

I'd capture network traffic, too, and see what's happening on the wire. There's nothing like seeing what's on the wire.

I'd turn on "Advanced Features" in the management console and dig into the cache when you're having the problem and see if something odd is being cached by the DNS server. I had a problem that, while I'm sure is completely unrelated to what you're seeing, where a Customer' ISP's DNS server would return a private IP address for hosts in their domain periodically. Looking at the cache showed me what was going on and led me to notifying the ISP of their problem.