DNS on Windows 2000 - page 6

This book is organized, more or less, to follow the evolution of a zone and its administrator. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 discuss Domain Name System theory. Chapter 3 through Chapter 6 help you to decide whether to set up your own zones, then describe how to go about it, should you choose to. The middle chapters, Chapter 7 through Chapter 11, describe how to maintain your zones, configure hosts to use your name servers, plan for the growth of your zones, create subdomains, secure your name servers, and integrate DNS with Active Directory. The last chapters, Chapter 12 through Chapter 14, deal with common problems and troubleshooting tools.

Here's a more detailed, chapter-by-chapter breakdown:

• Chapter 1 provides a little historical perspective and discusses the problems that motivated the development of DNS, then presents an overview of DNS theory.

• Chapter 2 goes over DNS theory in more detail, including the DNS namespace, domains, and name servers. We also introduce important concepts such as name resolution and caching.

• Chapter 3 covers how to choose and acquire your DNS software if you don't already have it and what to do with it once you've got it; that is, how to figure out what your domain name should be and how to contact the organization that can delegate your domain to you.

• Chapter 4 details how to set up your first two name servers, including creating your name server database, starting up your name servers, and checking their operation.

• Chapter 5 deals with DNS's MX record, which allows administrators to specify alternate hosts to handle a given destination's mail. The chapter covers mail-routing strategies for a variety of networks and hosts, including networks with security firewalls and hosts without direct Internet connectivity.

• Chapter 6 explains how to configure a Windows resolver.

• Chapter 7 describes the periodic maintenance administrators must perform to keep their domains running smoothly, such as checking name server health and authority.

• Chapter 8 covers how to plan for the growth and evolution of your domain, including how to get big and how to plan for moves and outages.

• Chapter 9 explores the joys of becoming a parent domain. We explain when to become a parent (i.e., create subdomains), what to call your children, how to create them (!), and how to watch over them.

• Chapter 10 goes over less common name server configuration options that can help you tune your name server's operation, secure your name server, and ease administration.

• Chapter 11 describes the new bells and whistles in Microsoft's DNS implementation for Windows 2000 that weren't present in Windows NT.

• Chapter 12 shows the ins and outs of the most popular tool for doing DNS debugging, including techniques for digging obscure information out of remote name servers.

• Chapter 13 covers many common DNS problems and their solutions and then describes a number of less common, harder-to-diagnose scenarios.

• Chapter 14 ties up all the loose ends. We cover DNS wildcarding; special configurations for networks that connect to the Internet through firewalls; hosts and networks with intermittent Internet connectivity via dial-up; network name encoding; and new, experimental record types.

• Appendix A contains a byte-by-byte breakdown of the formats used in DNS queries and responses as well as a comprehensive list of the currently defined resource record types.

• Appendix B describes how to load the Microsoft DNS Server from the Windows 2000 Server CD-ROM.

• Appendix C covers migrating from an existing BIND 4 name server to the Microsoft DNS Server.

• Appendix D lists the current top-level domains in the Internet domain namespace.