DNS setup with AD

[Shawn]

We have a native Windows 2000 domain. DNS is set up on 2
domain controllers.

One of the domain controllers has the "dot" (the record
that makes it a root server) DNS record because when we
were installing it (we thought) that's what we were told we
needed to do.

The other server doesn't have the "dot" record and has
forwarders set up.

When a machine is logged into the domain, DNS look-up for
anything on the network resolves just fine. But lookups
going to the internet fail sometimes. It seems to be
completely random. I've been trying to figure out why it
does this for a long time.

Anyway, I found something that says that the "dot" record
is probably what is causing the problem, so I'm going to
remove that record and set up forwarders and see if that
fixes it. I plan on doing it after hours so that I can fix
it if it breaks anything, but I'm wondering if anyone can
confirm that removing that record is something that needs
to be done, and I'm also wondering if it's going to cause
any problems that I'm unaware of right now.

Thanks in advance,
Shawn

 

[Rob Elder MVP-Networking]

It won't hurt your network. Remove the root zone and restart the DNS
service. The only time root zones are used are if you don't want access to
external sites.