Good day, Cloud Gurus,
and welcome back for this lesson
where we're going to take a look
at Managing Windows Server DNS.
Let's take a look at what we're going to cover.
First up, we'll cover off the types
of resource records that you can create within a DNS zone.
Then we'll take a look at configuring recursive DNS servers,
and then finally,
we'll do a demo where we will manage Windows server DNS.
Before I jump into resource records,
I just want to call one thing out.
A Fully Qualified Domain Name is made up of 2 parts.
The host, sometimes referred to as the host name,
and the domain name,
and the domain name is hosted
by the name server in the form
of a zone and resource records are stored
in the zone and resource records are a mapping
of a host name to something else.
It can be an IP address or another resource record,
and resource records can also be used to store information.
All right, let's take a look
at the types of resource records that you can create
and store in a DNS zone.
The first, and probably the most common, is an A record
or quadruple A record for IPv6,
and it maps a fully qualified domain name to an IP address.
Next we have pointer records, sometimes referred
to as PTR records, and they do the opposite.
They map an IP address to a Fully Qualified Domain Name
and PTR records are generally stored
in reverse lookup zones.
And then we have the start of authority record,
or the SOA record,
and it stores administrative information about the zone,
including details like the name server and the time to live.
And then we have the name server record or NS record
and name server records are used for any DNS server hosting
a full copy of the DNS zone.
And then we have the canonical name record or CNAME record
and it's an alias record
that's used to map a fully qualified domain name
to another fully qualified domain name.
And then we have the MX record or mail exchanger record.
And it's used to store information
about the email servers for that domain.
And we also have SRV records,
and they're used to store IP address
and port information for servers that host services
in the domain, and service records are used extensively
by Active Directory Domain Services.
And then finally we have the TXT or text record
and it's used to store text-based information about a host
or domain name and text records are frequently used
in domain validation scenarios.
All right, now let's take a look
at configuring recursive DNS servers.
When a DNS server is authoritative for a DNS zone,
it can respond directly to the client
with the answer to that client's DNS query,
but more often than not a DNS server, is not authoritative.
In a typical corporate network,
the DNS server might be authoritative
for only a handful of zones.
And for all other DNS zones,
the server will need to forward the request.
When the DNS server is not authoritative
and it needs to forward the request,
it's referred to as a recursive DNS server.
And there are a few options
for handling how DNS servers forward requests.
Let's take a look at some of those options.
You can configure a conditional forwarder,
which forwards requests for a specific zone
to a static list of name servers,
or you can create a stub zone, which forwards DNS requests
for a specific zone to a dynamic list of name servers.
You can also configure a server forwarder,
which forwards all unknown requests
to a static list of DNS servers.
And finally, you can configure root hints
and root hints are used as a last resort
to locate a name server for a given zone.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of managing Windows server DNS.
In this demonstration, we're going to use the DNS servers
we configured in the previous lesson
and we'll configure CORP-BNE-ADM01 as a DNS client
and we'll configure it to use CORP-BNE-DNS01
as it's configured DNS server.
We will create DNS records
and we'll take a look at forwarding,
both conditional and server forwarding,
and finally, we'll take a look at root hints.
Let's jump into the demo.
All right, here we are logged
on to CORP-BNE-ADM01
and we're going to configure this DNS client
to use our internal DNS server, CORP-BNE-DNS01.
So we're going to go ahead
and reconfigure the DNS client settings.
So we'll select the network settings
in server manager
and we'll right-click the network adapter
and select Properties.
And we'll navigate to TCP/IPv4
and we'll select to use the following DNS servers
and we'll enter in the IP address
for CORP-BNE-DNS01, which is 10.1.2.5.
We'll go ahead and click OK.
And then we'll go ahead and click Close
and then we can go ahead and close Network Connections
and we'll go ahead and close Server Manager.
All right, now let's use PowerShell to see
if this server can resolve the DNS name
for CORP-BNE-DNS01.
We'll go ahead and launch PowerShell
and then we'll use the resolve DNS name PowerShell cmdlet
and enter in the Fully Qualified Domain Name
for CORP-BNE-DNS01.
All right,
and we're unable to resolve that DNS name
and that's because, while we've created a zone
for corp.barrierreefaudio.com,
we haven't actually created
an A record for CORP-BNE-DNS01.
Let's jump over to the DNS server and configure an A record.
All right, so here we are logged on to CORP-BNE-DNS01.
We'll go ahead
and launch the DNS Management console,
source select Start and then Administrative Tools.
And then we'll launch the DNS Management console.
We'll go ahead and expand our server
and we'll expand Forward Lookup Zones.
We'll navigate to our zone.
All right.
There's no A record here for our server.
Let's go ahead and create an A record.
So we'll right-click and select new host A record.
Now we'll enter in the name for our server,
which is CORP-BNE-DNS01.
And then we'll enter in the IP address
for this server, which is 10.1.2.5,
and then we can go ahead and click Add Host, and then OK,
and then Done.
Now, I just want to point out one additional property
for this resource record that isn't available
in the standard DNS Management console.
So we're going to go ahead and select View
and then Advanced
to enable the advanced DNS Management console
and then we'll right-click our new resource record
and select Properties.
And what I want to point out down here
is the time to live, or TTL.
And that indicates how long a DNS server
or DNS client should cache this DNS record.
And as we see here,
this DNS record is set to have a time to live of 1 hour.
We'll go ahead and click OK.
All right.
Now let's jump back to our administrative server and see
if we're able to resolve that Fully Qualified Domain Name.
So we'll just press up to get our previous command
and we can see with that resource record created,
we're now able to successful resolve the DNS host name
for our internal DNS server.
Now let's take a look at our external DNS zone.
To do that, we'll jump over to our external DNS server.
We'll navigate to Start,
and then Windows Administrative Tools.
And then we'll open up the DNS Management console
and we'll navigate into our Forward Lookup Zone.
And we can see
we have a resource record here
for test.barrierreefaudio.com.
Let's go ahead and see
if we can resolve that from our DNS client.
So we'll run the resolve DNS name PowerShell cmdlet again,
and then test.barrierreefaudio.com.
And we're unable to resolve that DNS name
and that's because our DNS client is pointed
to our internal DNS server,
but our DNS server is not configured
to forward DNS requests to our external DNS server.
Let's jump over
to our internal DNS server and configure a forwarder.
So here we are on our internal DNS server. We're
going to go ahead and configure a conditional forwarder
for barrierreefaudio.com to send those requests
to our external DNS server.
So we'll right-click the Conditional Forwarders node
and then we'll select New Conditional Forwarder.
We'll enter in the DNS domain name, barrierreefaudio.com,
then we'll enter in the IP address
for our external DNS server, which is 10.51.0.5.
And then we can go ahead and click OK.
Then we'll jump back to our DNS client and see
if we're able to successfully resolve that DNS host name.
We'll just press up to get our previous command.
All right.
And with that conditional forwarder in place,
we can now resolve test.barrierreefaudio.com.
Now let's try and resolve google.com.
We'll use the resolve DNS name
PowerShell cmdlet again, and then google.com.
Now, how do we think the is working?
Let's jump over to our internal DNS server and investigate.
All right.
So here we are on our internal DNS server.
We'll right-click on our server and select Properties.
Let's first check to see
if we have any server forwarders configured
for our DNS server
to forward requests to another DNS server.
All right.
So we can see with no server forwarders configured,
our DNS server is using root hints to locate google.com.
Let's go ahead and remove all of our root hints.
We'll go ahead and click OK.
And then we'll flush the DNS server cache
by right-clicking on our DNS server
and then selecting Clear Cache.
We'll navigate back over to our DNS client
and we'll clear our DNS client cache
with the clear DNS client cache PowerShell cmdlet.
Now let's try and resolve google.com again
and we can see here with our root hints removed
and no server forwarders configured,
we're not able to resolve google.com.
Let's jump back over to our internal DNS server
and configure some server forwarders.
In the DNS Management console,
we'll right-click our server and select Properties
and we'll navigate
to the forwarders tab and we'll select Edit.
And then we'll add in two DNS server forwarders.
I'm going to go ahead
and use the CloudFlare public DNS servers for this.
And if you're not aware of the CloudFlare DNS servers,
they're just two freely available public DNS resolvers.
So we'll enter in the
IP addresses for the CloudFlare DNS servers.
1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1.
We can go ahead and click OK.
And then, OK again.
Now let's jump back to our DNS client
and see if we're able to resolve google.com.
And we can see with our DNS server forwarders configured,
we can now resolve google.com again.
All right.
That concludes this demo.
Let's wrap up with a bit of a summary
of what we've covered in this lesson and some key takeaways.
All right, let's take a look
at what we've covered in this lesson.
An A record is a mapping of a host name to an IP address
and a pointer or PTR record is the reverse,
mapping an IP address to a host name.
Whereas a CNAME record is a mapping
of a host name to another host name and service records,
or SRV records, are used to locate services
and they're used extensively by active directory.
And it's important to remember
that conditional forwarders can be used
to forward requests for a specific domain.
Whereas server forwarders are used to forward
all unknown requests to another DNS server.
All right.
That wraps up this lesson.
Thanks for being with me.
And I hope you found it useful
and I'll look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.