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So I'm building a lab to learn AD and networking best practices and I've setup an AD domain on an internal network. Doing some reading, I've come upon an idea of using a caching DNS server to resolve external (internet) domain names, in an internal network. Now that I've got this setup I'm wondering, why would I actually want to resolve external domain names in a sandboxed internal network? What is the benefit if I can't reach the network anyway? The only theory is maybe for proxy servers?

Initially I thought I would have clients connecting from a public network through a VPN perhaps, so I set this up, but the client would have 2 NIC's and each their own DNS servers specified. What am I missing here from the big picture...?

Thanks, Paul

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You're correct about there not being any inherent value to this. Labs tend to work best when they're as self-contained as possible. Having an internal DNS domain dedicated to your lab helps to ensure that the changes that you made in the production environment don't impact your lab, and more importantly, that changes made to support your lab can't somehow impact the production environment.

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  • So how do you handle getting outside of this isolated network and still keep it.. isolated? May 12, 2015 at 15:19
  • Typically one of two ways: either a firewall controls access and the only traffic allowed is to/from desktops, or with a server connected to both networks that is used for management tasks.
    – Andrew B
    May 12, 2015 at 19:27

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