Multi-Homed Windows 2000 Server with DNS problems

[Pulsifer]

I have a multi-homed Windows 2000 Server that is acting as a DNS server for my personal network. When I first setup the active directory, I named it pulsifer.net (which is my last name dot net). Now I have static ip address for my server (one network card) that is on the internet and the other network card is on my private network (which gives out non-routable ips i.e. 192.168.0.xxx). Now anytime I want to do a nslookup or ping another computer on my internal network it always adds .pulsifer.net to the end of it (e.g. computer1.pulsifer.net) and then resolves the name by going out on the internet and looking up pulsifer.net which will always return 62.70.3.233 no matter what. This is not my ip, it is the person who owns the pulsifer.net domain name. Now if I re-installed my server and made my domain something that is not available on the internet would an nslookup or ping command from a client in my internal network resolve it only through my local DNS server and not try to go out to an external server. To make this even more confusing, is that I do have a domain name registered to my static ip address. Should I name my Windows 2000 domain after its DNS name? Sorry if this is confusing. Basically I want all internal addresses resolved at my server and to not go out to an external DNS server for resolution, but still keep the capability to lookup external addresses and manage this without giving every computer on my internal network, a routable internet ip, but rather something like 192.168.0.xxx. Thanks.

 

[kyoshozx]

Hey Pulsifer,

Well I'm no expert in win2k dns, but i've been doing some reading, and trying to learn it myself. First, all your computers on your network should automatically register with the DNS on your server (if they are running win2k). So when you type ping computer1.pulsifer.net it should be able to resolve this address without going to the internet. I think your problem is that your clients are not registering with the DNS server on your network. A quick way to check is to go into DNS and check your forward lookup zones. If thats the case you'll have to trouble shoot and see why they're not registering with your DNS.

To stop your DNS server from going to the internet, disable recursion, in DNS, server properties, advance tab.

 

[Pulsifer]

Thanks for your help kyoshozx, but disabling recursion did not help though, because no external ips could be looked up. What I did do is change the Listen on: property (which is under server properties on the Interfaces tab) to all ip addresses instead of my two ip addresses that I had listed (my internet ip and my private network ip). This seems to work fine on all of my client machines (3 Windows 2000 clients, 1 Windows NT, 1 Windows 98 and 1 HP-UX), but when I do nslookups while on my Windows 2000 server it still goes out to the internet to resolve the internal names. Everything from the clients work fine, all internal ips are resolved from my server and all external ips are resolved from outside DNS servers. Does anyone know how to stop this behavior on my server. Thanks.

 

[Wizkid]

Try this:

change the DNS servers for all you network connections on the server to 127.0.0.1 and see if that solves the problem.