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I have an Active-Directory integrated stub zone that appears to be functioning properly (zone data is populated on every DC). It is stored in the DomainDNSZones partition, but I do not see any dnsNode objects in its container. I was previously under the impression that any DNS zones that are domain-scoped would store all of their zone information here, but I see that there must be more to it than that. Where else could the zone data be loaded from?

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A Stub Zone's records are stored in memory only, and are lost when the DNS service is stopped.

The DNS server will, upon starting up, query the zone's SOA and NS records from the defined list of authoritative servers (it can also be set to add additional received NS records to its local list) to store and serve. It will also serve up any glue A or AAAA records that are needed, if the authoritative name servers' DNS names are within this same stub zone - these records should be returned as extra data by the authoritative server in response to the NS query.

The only records that the Stub Zone which needs to be stored in a persistent way is the list of authoritative servers to query for the NS and SOA records, to populate the zone. This is stored in the dNSProperty attribute of the zone's object within the DomainDNSZones or ForestDNSZones partition.

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Thank you very much; that explains a lot. Might I ask where you found this information? I'd love to be able to go straight to the source next time. – bshacklett Jan 31 at 15:35
"Find" isn't quite the right word - I came by my information by setting it up in a lab environment and digging. – Shane Madden Jan 31 at 16:23
Got it. Well, thanks for sharing your hard earned information! – bshacklett Jan 31 at 22:05
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Why don't you look in dnsmgmt at the the stub zone which will list all the records (which then should allow you to see their local location)?

Edit: Ah, I didn't read the word container so I assume you used DNS Manager. A Zone DB should be stored in %systemroot%/SYSTEM32/DNS/domain_name.dns.

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That would be for a non-AD integrated zone. AD integrated zones are stored in AD, not the file system of the DNS server. – joeqwerty Jan 30 at 18:50
Why did you just not write "a zone that stores its zone data in Active Directory. DNS zone files are not needed," then? – Ethabelle Jan 30 at 19:01
I don't understand what you're asking. Are you asking why I didn't phrase my comment the way you suggest in your comment? If so, then what I stated in my comment is exactly the same idea, stated using different words. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you completely. – joeqwerty Jan 30 at 19:09
@Ethabelle: AD integrated zones aren't stored as files, they're inside the AD database (look at the original question). – pauska Jan 31 at 14:45
@pauska And how is what you said different than what joeqwerty said? – Ethabelle Jan 31 at 14:48
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