sub-domain setup

[Dan McDaniel]

On Mon 28.Nov.11 14:39, Doug Barton wrote:
>On 11/28/2011 10:20, Dan McDaniel wrote:
>>
>> I'm setting up a new DNS server. We have two offices linked by a VPN.
>> I'm trying to decide whether to have everything under a single domain
>> (example.com) or to split them into sub-domains (office1.example.com,
>> office2.example.com).
>>
>> I wondered if there is a consensus on this. What are the pros and cons
>> of the two different setups?
>
>You haven't given nearly enough information. Roughly how many hosts
>would be in each of the 3 zone files? Do the 2 offices share a DHCP
>server? Are you doing dynamic updates? Might you ever want to have an
>administrative separation between the 2 offices, such that there may be
>personnel who have rights to edit one of the zone files, but not all 3?
>Is one of the zones likely to be static for long periods of time, but
>one or more of the others are fairly dynamic?
>
>Without knowing more about your environment it's hard to answer your
>question intelligently. :)
>
There is already administrative separation. I am responsible for one of
the offices which includes about 30 users.  The other office is smaller
and doesn't really have a proper DNS setup (but I can't fix that at this
point). I want to enable users in my office to look up local hosts as
well as hosts in the other office. The zone in my office will be
dynamically updated by my DHCP server. The zone for the other office
will be static.

One thing that I've noticed is that with a single zone of example.com if
the host is not found (typo or whatever) the query ends up at the
external DNS and comes back with the address of our external web server.
This tends to confuse the users. With a sub-domain the bad query to
typo.office1.example.com just fails and the error is easier to
understand.

I realize that for an environment this small I could completely re-do it
in the future without too much trouble, but I still want to set it up in
accordance with what is considered good practice.

Dan