DNS for the Win2K Administrator
A magnificent guide to a challenging subject.
- By Yolanda R. Reid
- November 01, 2001
William Wong has done a magnificent job discussing Windows 2000 DNS Server.
He has thoroughly covered how Win2K DNS fits into the overall Win2K services
picture.
This is all the more impressive because DNS in a Win2K environment isn’t
an easy subject to cover.
This book starts with a brief, but comprehensive, explanation of how
DNS works, including a nice list of the RFCs related to DNS (in case you
want to further investigate DNS). The most fascinating area of this book
is the next few chapters, which look at Win2K Active Directory from a
DNS perspective. Wong gives very good examples of AD structures, with
DNS as a focal point. To show how this all works, he walks the reader
through setting up an AD and DNS server. Even if you’ve done this many
times (like I have), you’ll find this book a great resource. I was truly
impressed with the level of detail. While this book is geared toward those
who are just jumping into DNS, it’s also useful for those with experience
in DNS setups. If you’re in the middle of designing your AD infrastructure
or you want to make sure you’ve thought about all the details, check out
the book’s network maps.
The author impressively covers interoperability with Windows NT 4.0 DNS;
WINS; and, much to my surprise, BIND (Berkley Internet Name Domain) 8.0
and higher. While the author was the first to admit that explaining BIND
would be material for a second book, he does a good job of introducing
BIND to the neophyte. This book isn’t the only reference to depend on
if you’re actually interoperating BIND and Win2K DNS, but the author covers
this subject well enough to give you an idea of what BIND can do. The
one correction I have is that the author mistakenly says that versions
8 and higher of BIND support AD. To be precise, the issue actually was
that versions of BIND prior to 8.1.2 didn’t support Dynamic DNS (DDNS).
BIND 4.9.7 interoperates with Win2K DNS but not DDNS.
Other than that one faux pas, this book is a well-written and thoroughly
detailed discussion of DNS. This is an easy read because it’s such an
interesting subject and very well written. I recommend this book to anyone
interested in exploring DNS or Win2K AD.
About the Author
Yolanda R. Reid, MCSE, CCNA, works closely with Win2K, Windows NT, and BackOffice products. As an employee of USI, her specialty is enterprise systems and designing Win2K infrastructures.