SilentRage, when you get a chance? DNS questions

hey, my first post here. I have spent the last 3 days reading, 90% of it reading posts in this forum. You really seem to know your stuff and i give u props. I was wondering if you would do some digging when you get a chance and see what you can find that i've done right/wrong in setting up my dns. i have learned quite a lot and I seem to have gotten everything working. Quite honestly though, i'm not quite sure how i got here from there! lol.

allrighty then
i have only 2 machines. the dns/web machine is running server 2003, with IIS configured, DNS, AD, and routing and remote access for my LAN. i registered the name URL with godaddy.com. the public ip address is 205.244.100.20. I created a forward lookup zone for wikkedpc.com. I created host (A) records for ns1.wikkedpc.com ns2.******.com and server.********.com (server is computer name of server pc).
i registered the nameservers ns1.*******.com and ns2.wikkedpc.com with godaddy.

like i said, everything seems to be working, but i get the feeling that it is not quite right. Any advice you have to further me along would be most appeciated.


Thanx!

JR

I assume you're the guy you sent me a message using my contact form and didn't bother to leave an email address I could reply with?

Well I'm in just the mood for a domain review.

Domain Registration Status

Looks like the domain is active, and the name servers have been set. Clicking on both name server links give me your public IP. All seems good so far.

wikkedpc.com Active Name Servers

Registration status matches the active name servers. Good good.

wikkedpc.com Zone Name Servers

What a mess. We should be looking at the exact same results as the active name servers check. In addition, I should never see LAN IPs in your zone. The following records need to be deleted from your wikkedpc.com zone.

wikkedpc.com NS server.wikkedpc.local.
ns1.wikkedpc.com. A 192.168.0.1
ns2.wikkedpc.com. A 192.168.0.1

wikkedpc.com SOA Record

In public zones, we should only have public information. Your primary server needs to be changed to "ns1.wikkedpc.com" and your contact email address needs to be changed to "hostmaster.wikkedpc.com" or some other appropriate address.

wikkedpc.com Root Domain Records

There are no MX records. This means that email-sent-to@wikkedpc.com won't work.
There isn't an A record. This means that http://wikkedpc.com won't work.

wikkedpc.com Zone Transfer

Unfurtunately your server won't let me view your entire zone's contents, so I won't be able to pick on you for anything else.

Thanks for taking the time to post in reply. Sorry i forgot my email address, it was late when i posted. I am rather new at all of this. I will try to work on the things you mentioned. Now that i see a little better how you are using the DNS crawler perhaps i can figure some stuff out using that. I will take some time after work today to try and get that cleaned out a little.

About MX records.. i'm not sure what they actually do? Would i be using that to forward mail to URL to a regular mail account? Once i get this all sorted i was planning on starting to play around with MS Exchange. Another thing that's confusing me are Cname records. What exactly are those for ?

thanx for the advice

JR.

*edit* i changed some things this morning, i suppose it takes some time to propogate. I also enabled zone transfers, as if you needed something else to pick on me about

JR

*edit* once more... nope, wasn't me that sent you a message, besides posting here anyway. (that line in your response confused me a bit)

wikkedpc.com Zone Transfer

SOA Record:

server.wikkedpc.local needs to be changed to ns1.wikkedpc.com

You need to delete the following records:

wikkedpc.com. NS server.wikkedpc.local.

You need to create the following records:

wikkedpc.com. MX 10 mail.wikkedpc.com.
mail.wikkedpc.com. A 205.244.100.20
ns1.wikkedpc.com. A 205.244.100.20
ns2.wikkedpc.com. A 205.244.100.20

MX Records Definition

Let's say you want email to be sent to bud@mybuddy.com. In this example, "mybuddy.com" is the mail domain. A mail domain should always have a MX record so that a mail server knows where to send the email to. So in the above MX record I told you to create, "wikkedpc.com" is your mail domain and needs to have a MX record associated with it. This MX record has 2 data fields. The first data field is the mail server's priority. In the event that you have multiple mail servers and MX records, the mail server with the highest priority (the lowest number) will be tried first. If that server is down, mail sending software will try the next server. The second data field is the mail server. This MUST be a domain, and MAY NOT be an IP address. After you assign a mail server to a mail domain using an MX record, that mail server domain needs to have an IP address so that it can be reached. That is the second record I told you to create.

ack. no matter what i try to change server.wikkedpc.local to ns1.wikkedpc.com it just changes itself back. i don't understand what i'm doing wrong.

my active directory domain is wikkedpc.local
should i rework everything and name my active directory domain wikkedpc.com ? seems like that would cause more problems than it would fix.

upon setting up DNS on this win2k3 box it creates the forward lookup zone wikkedpc.local as that is my active directory domain name. i created a second forward lookup zone named wikkedpc.com. is this the wrong way to go about things? Otherwise i can't seem to find any way to get rid of this server.wikkedpc.local. i understand that it shouldn't be there but it just.. won't.. go... away!.

i have deleted both zones, and even my entire DNS service to start over about 3 times, i get the same results each time.


JR.

That's the curse of using Microsoft DNS Server with Active Directory. Active Directory keeps doing things without your permission. If you don't manage to remove the NS record it may cause problems. You don't want caching servers to cache that record and try to send requests to a server.wikkedpc.local with a private IP. It will fail.

does it have anythin to do with my local domain wikkedpc.local and the forward lookup zone for that ?

Hey btw, thanx for the help man!


J.
*edit*

HA! Have a look @ that, i think i got it right this time

yep everything looks good.