Aging & Scavenging of W2K DNS Records

[Barry Finkel]

Richard Phillips <richphillips at lucent.com> wrote:

> Does anyone have any recommendations/Best Practices regarding the Aging &
> Scavenging of W2K DNS records??

Here are my personal views on the matter.  I do not really trust the MS
W2k DNS product, so I am advising my clients that they should keep
their DNS zones on my BIND master, and only keep the dynamic SRV
records (i.e., the four "_" zones) on the W2k DNS server.  This is true
for most of my clients.  There is one client who wanted his forward
zone and his five reverse zones on the MS W2k DNS server; most of his
updates come from his MS DHCP server.  In the five reverse zones I see
addresses that have two, three, or four associated names.  Some of
these are not fully qualified (e.g., cmtxyz.)  In most cases, these
one-level names also have fully qualified names (cmtxyz.cmt.anl.gov.)
registered.  Here is a sample of one address in one of the reverse
zones:

     133     900     IN      PTR     cmtw52x.cmt.anl.gov.
             900     IN      PTR     cmtw52x.
             900     IN      PTR     cmtw52.cmt.anl.gov.

We have not done research as to how these various names are being
generated.  These multiple registrations do not seem to cause any
problems, so it is not a high priority here to remove the bad entries.

To get back to the topic at hand, I have not enabled MS DNS scavenging.
I, as well as other responders, do not see why it should be needed if
the DHCP server and DDNS are working correctly.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Electronics and Computing Technologies Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-9689
Building 221, Room B236              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4844             IBMMAIL:  I1004994