Windows 7 / Networking

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Add Query Forwarding

Once the DNS Server is installed and configured, you will want to consider how to get name resolution for names that your DNS servers are not authoritative for. If you think about the way DNS servers resolve names, you'll realize they use a process of recursive queries to find an authoritative server that will resolve a name to an IP address. Your DNS servers simply do not know all the possible host names and IP addresses in the world's networks. To resolve host names for domains outside of the ones your servers are authoritative for, you will need to configure query forwarding.

Your network will likely have several DNS servers. If you configure one of those servers to pass queries from inside your network to the Internet, you have really just designated that server as a forwarder. You would change your network firewall settings to allow that DNS traffic from the forwarder through the firewall and out to the Internet. Queries will be returned from the Internet to the forwarder, and then the forwarder will pass those responses to the appropriate internal server. Do not host a local DNS zone on your forwarder! It is exposed to the Internet, and any zone stored on the forwarder will also be exposed to the Internet. You really don't want your internal DNS zone data becoming available online.

Maybe you don't want to simply forward all your unresolved queries through a single forwarder. Maybe you want to forward requests for certain domains through a specific forwarder. This concept of setting conditions under which queries are forwarded and through which server they are forwarded is called conditional forwarding. It offers a little more flexibility than traditional forwarding, and it can be far more effective than traditional forwarding if you are in a private network that hosts multiple domains, each with their own DNS zones. To add forwarders to your DNS architecture, you will use DNS Manager:

1. Open DNS Manager.
2. Right-click the server name.
3. Choose Properties.
4. Select the Forwarders tab.
5. Click Edit. The Edit Forwarders dialog box opens.
6. At this point you can add the desired server to your forwarders list.