[Hot Dang]

I work in a school and so have limited funds available so our setup is far from ideal. We have one win2k server (single domain) running most things for 350 clients (win2k and XP pro).The council runs our firewall, e-mail and broadband routing externally and they have 2 DNS servers. Unfortunately our server has no local DNS as far as I can gather. If we lose connection to the council DNS servers, login times increase dramatically and in general they time out before logging in. I'm fairly sure that this is a DNS issue and was never a problem when the clients were win98SE. I figure that I need to get a local DNS service set up to solve this problem but don't really know how. Unfortunately I got this job in the middle of my MCSE training and was unable to continue, crucially missing implementing DNS

Me and 1600 users would appreciate any help you can give or a handy link to a good DNS guide.

Thanks

[jmmijo]

You mentioned a firewall which I would think maybe providing DHCP services internally or on the LAN side of things.

Can you verify this with the IT folks that admin this box ?!?

It sound like you could just as easily setup a second nic on this PDC, if there isn't one already and just use ICS but this maybe insufficient due to the number of users you're indicating on the domain

Also, you could check the settings on the PDC and note if there are only one or two DNS servers listed. If so then include a third or fourth DNS server which the HOST ISP would provide, unless these DNS addresses that are listed are the HOST ISP's too.

The company I work for provides our own internal DNS server along with our external HOST ISP DNS server addresses. Since we have a couple of different HOST ISP's we have a multi-homed setup.

Not the easiest to configure and maintain but we have backup in case of failure.

[clutch]

Are you running Active Directory, or is this network a member of an NT4 domain? What makes you think DNS is the issue (certain errors, checking network traffic, etc.)?

[duhmez]

Windows 2000 domain controller requires DNS. If your external DNS does not have your internal 2l/XP machines registered you will have issues. You should then install the DNS server onto your 2K domain controller. Next is to assign your domain controller as a DNS server on all clients. f you are using DHCP on the server, you can specifiy the DNS server addresses that DHCP will hand out; you will need to specify your domain controller and a good idea is to also suply your main external dns servers as well.

I don't know that this would cause your issues, but it is a start for a proper win2k domain setup.

[Hot Dang]

We are running DHCP and active directory in a single domain setup. Our server ponts to two external DNS servers, the clients get all that info from the server due to DHCP.

The reason I think it is a DNS issue is because XP is more reliant on TC/IP than 98SE and we don't get the same problems with 98SE clients. Additionally some of the county IT folk have suggested DNS may be our problem. From what I can ascertain from the server DNS settings and event logs I'm sure we have no local DNS and am sure we should have.

I'm very much a DNS noob, I understand the basic principles of DNS but am not sure how to implement them on the server.

[clutch]

I don't know how your Forest/domain setup is, but basically you would set it up as in my last post here:

http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=26626&highlight=dns+domain

Let me know if you are still having issues with it.

[Catdog02]

Active Directory won't run without local DNS. I suspect that the settings you're looking at are external addresses for Internet named traffic, are you sure there is only 1 NIC in the machine? Normally there'd be two - one for your internet to pass through, the other for the server to provide local services.

I'd point the finger at the link between your machine and the rest of the world.

That being said, if anyone knows the answer, Clutch is the guy to ask.