JSI Tip 6074. Windows 2000 DNS white paper.

The Windows 2000 DNS White Paper contains:

Summary

This paper describes the Windows® 2000 operating system Domain Naming System (DNS), including design, implementation, and migration issues. It discusses how DNS is implemented in Windows 2000, shows examples of DNS implementations, and describes the architectural criteria that network architects and administrators should consider when designing a DNS namespace for the Active Directory™ service to provide reliable network naming services.

The designers of the Windows® 2000 operating system chose the Domain Name System (DNS) as the name service for the operating system. Windows 2000 Server includes an IETF standards-based Domain Name System Server. Because it is RFC compliant it is fully compatible with any other RFC compliant DNS servers. Use of the Windows 2000 Domain Name System server is not mandatory. Any DNS Server implementation supporting Service Location Resource Records is sufficient to provide the name service for Windows 2000–based computers.

However, because this implementation of DNS is designed to fully take advantage of the Windows 2000 Active Directory™ service, it is the recommended DNS server for any networked organization with a significant investment in Windows or extranet partners with Windows-based systems. For example, while conventional DNS Servers use single-master replication, Windows 2000 DNS can be integrated into Active Directory service, so that it uses the Windows 2000 multi-master replication engine. (Note that Active Directory supports multi-master replication.) In this way, network managers can simplify system administration by not having to maintain a separate replication topology for DNS.

DNS in Windows 2000 provides a unique DNS Server implementation that is fully interoperable with other standards-based implementations of DNS Server.

The purpose of this document is to assist network architects and administrators in planning the Windows 2000 Active Directory service DNS deployment strategy. It covers the design, implementation, and migration issues that need to be considered when rolling out a scalable and robust DNS solution as a global name service.

Although this paper assumes familiarity with DNS, it provides a short overview of DNS basics.