I have inherited a complete mess of AD/DNS issues that I am trying to plough through. I have a single Forest that is split into 2 Domains, the Forest Root and the Child Domain. There are 2 DCs in the FR Domain and 6 in the Child (2 in head office and 1 at each of the 4 remote sites.) All DCs are running 2003. My issue is that it seems there was a delegated DNS zone created, which seems OK – the 6 child DCs are listed as Name Servers at the Forest level. However, it seems that an identical DNS Zone was created at Forest level for the Child Domain – but its replication scope is Domain. This is obviously not being updated by the Child’s DNS zone – as the Child's is also set to Domain wide replication. The issue is then compounded by another Zone existing in the Child Domain for the Forest’s Domain, this one however is set to Forest Wide – which doesn’t replicate to the Forest as the Forest already has its own Zone and the Domain partition will take precedence…
I also do not have an _MSDCS Domain zone at the Forest level – although, from my research, it seems that this may not be necessary? Now, the Child.Domain.com zone is fully populated and working properly, so I want to keep that and I don’t see any reason to remove the delegation?
So, my thoughts are to:
- Create an _MSDCS.Domain.com Zone (if needed?)
- Delete the Child.Domain.com DNS zone from the Forest DC (basically empty)
- Delete the Domain.com DNS zone from the Child DC – setup conditional forwarders to reference the 2 FR DCs.
Does anyone have any suggestions re this? Everything is working at the moment, DC Diags all good, but it’s not ideal and if the worst should happen, I wouldn’t know where to start looking! I get the impression that this mess was created to get something working, what I don't know, but there must be an easier way?
My goal here would be to have just two DNS Zones; the FR Zone with a delegation to the Child and then the Child's Zone. At the moment, there are four of which two are redundant.
I hope this makes sense; it's taken me a little while to comprehend what's been done!
Thanks in advance…