Exam Essentials

Understand the current DNS infrastructure.     If you do not understand the current DNS infrastructure, you will not know what types of DNS servers are in place and how they interact with the internal and external domain names .

Identify the current namespace.     You will need to determine if the company is using a namespace that will work for your design. If is will, you will need to determine if you will use the existing namespace internally, externally, or both.

Identify the Internet domain name registrations requirements.     If the organization is using an Internet presence, you could continue to use that name. If you do not, you will need to determine what you will use for your Internet presence, register it, and then determine how you will use it in conjunction with your internal namespace.

Identify NetBIOS naming requirements.     Determine if you have clients or applications that require NetBIOS. If you do, you will need to determine how you will provide name resolution for those clients and where the WINS servers that provide that functionality will be located.

Identify interoperability with Active Directory, DNS, WINS, and DHCP.     DNS is required for Active Directory to function and DNS zones can be made Active Directory “integrated. DNS and WINS can be used together to provide a fully functional name resolution method between clients that support hostname and computer name resolution. DHCP can provide clients with configuration options that make assigning DNS and WINS servers more efficient for administrators. DHCP can also register clients within a dynamic DNS zone so that the administrator does not have to manually enter the host information in DNS.

Understand zone requirements.     Active Directory requires that the DNS server supports SRV records. Although not a requirement, to ease the administrative load, the DNS server should also support dynamic DNS registrations.

Understand name resolution service security.     DNS and WINS servers need to be secured from attacks so that attackers are not able to footprint the infrastructure, cause DoS attacks, redirect users to the wrong servers, or modify the information within the zone to cause resolution issues with the clients.

Understand DNS strategies for interoperability with UNIX BIND.     BIND servers can be used to host Active Directory records, but the zones cannot be Active Directory “integrated. BIND servers and Windows Server 2003 DNS servers can be used together within the same infrastructure. Either server type can be delegated control of a zone from the other type, and zone transfers from either one can go to the other.

Identify WINS replication strategies.     WINS replication should be configured to be as efficient as possible so that clients can locate the correct resources. Push/pull replication can be used to keep the servers synchronized. Designing an efficient replication topology should involve a huband-spoke topology to keep the replication convergence time to a minimum.

Identify DNS zone storage.     DNS zones can be stored as files if they are primary or secondary standard zones. They can also be Active Directory “integrated if they are primary or stub zones.

Identify server placement options.     Servers should be placed close to the users that will use them but should not consume more traffic on a WAN link when replicating data than would be used when querying the zone. In the case of a remote site where name resolution for resources in the site does not occur, you should consider creating a caching-only server.