Fixed: DNZ Zone disappears on every DNS service restart

[Ryan White]

Hi all,

Just figured I'd drop this here in case anybody is having a similar
problem.

My company has a few domains that our Win2k DNS servers are serving,
the two of interest being company.com and corp.company.com. We were
having an issue where every time any of our DNS/DC's were reboot or
had the DNS service restarted, the company.com zone would magically
disappear from the DNS management MMC, and wouldn't be loaded by the
DNS service. We scratched our heads on this one for a while, before I
gave up and made my first ever paid support call to MS. Luckily, they
had it fixed in about 5 minutes flat.

Turns out if you open AD User and Computers, and view the Advanced
properties, under the System folder, MicrosoftDNS, there was a ghost
entry for the zone already in there, even though nobody had ever tried
to load it as AD-integrated! (At least not since I've been working
here). Anyway, all we had to do was delete that ghost entry, and
everything started working fine after reboots and such.

The theory is that MS DNS would start up on any of our domain
controllers, and see it had a flat file zone for company.com as well
as an AD entry for the same company.com zone, so it would dump the
flat file, and try the AD zone. But, since this was just an empty or
outdated ghost entry, this zone couldn't be loaded, so MS DNS would
just give up (without ANY errors ANYWHERE), and not load the zone.
Talk about annoying! Anyway, it's been resolved, and I felt pretty
stupid after finding out it was so easy to fix.

=)

Thanks,

-ryan.

 

[Theape1974]

Hello Ryan,

We have the same problem over here. I searched the whole internet t
find a solution on this and I finally ended up finding your message

It made me very happy to see that I am not alone with this.

I have one question: I have 2 entries in MicrosoftDNS

One with the zone name and one with the "zone name + CNF: + a
address".

Should I delete them both?

Best regards

Davi


-
Theape197

 

[Ace Fekay [MVP]]

In

Hello Ryan,

We have the same problem over here. I searched the whole internet to
find a solution on this and I finally ended up finding your message

It made me very happy to see that I am not alone with this.

I have one question: I have 2 entries in MicrosoftDNS

One with the zone name and one with the "zone name + CNF: + an
address".

Should I delete them both?

Best regards

David

Curious, I can't see your original post and am wondering what it was and if
you could share the fix for your specific problem?

As for the CNF that you've found in your ADUC under the MicrosoftDNS
container, any time you see anything in AD with a CNF, it means its a
conflicting entry in the database due to two or more entries on another DC
believe they had an updated copy and this conflicts with it since it may
have an older time stamp, so therefore its treated as a conflict. There's
really nothing much you can do with that, so you can safely delete it.

--
Regards,
Ace

Please direct all replies ONLY to the Microsoft public newsgroups
so all can benefit.

This posting is provided "AS-IS" with no warranties or guarantees
and confers no rights.

Ace Fekay, MCSE 2003 & 2000, MCSA 2003 & 2000, MCSE+I, MCT, MVP
Microsoft Windows MVP - Windows Server - Directory Services

Security Is Like An Onion, It Has Layers
HAM AND EGGS: A day's work for a chicken;
A lifetime commitment for a pig.

 

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

MF> Curious, I can't see your original post [...]

It wasn't his. As always, Google Groups and the contents of the
References: header are your friends.

<URL:http://groups.google.com./[email protected]>

 

[Ace Fekay [MVP]]

In

Curious, I can't see your original post [...]

It wasn't his. As always, Google Groups and the contents of the
References: header are your friends.

<URL:http://groups.google.com./groups?selm=e6060aa8.0407151753.39bd65d6@po
sting.google.com>

Thanks Jonathan! I'll have to remember the URL syntax you provided and put
in the reference from the header next time.

Ace

 

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

MF> I'll have to remember the URL syntax you provided and put
MF> in the reference from the header next time.

Or you can simply use Google Groups' "Advanced Search" and stick the
Message-ID into the "message ID" field. (-:

 

[Ace Fekay [MVP]]

In

Or you can simply use Google Groups' "Advanced Search" and stick the
Message-ID into the "message ID" field. (-:

Thanks