DNS shutdown unexpectedly - How to prevent!

[Bill Nguyen]

This morning our Exchange 2003 went down because the DNS service on another
DC shutdown unexpectedly. I spent a considerable amount of time looking
around and restarted the Exchange server several times before I realized
that the cause was the DNS server wasn't running.
The event log show no detail as to why the DNS server shut down by itself:
-------
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7031
Date: 7/2/2004
Time: 8:13:50 AM
User: N/A
Computer: DNSSERVER
Description:
The DNS Server service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s).
The following corrective action will be taken in 0 milliseconds: No action.

---------
Even though I set to restart the service in "recovery" tab, it never did try
to restart!
Please help with the following questions:

1. How can I get notified if this DNS service is down? Ii there any
utilities that can send messages or email when a certain service is down?
2. Can I have backup DNS servers so that dependent services won't be
interrupted if the main DNS is down?
Thanks for all the help .
Bill

 

[Guest]

You can certainly run multiple DNS servers within an organization, and for the sake of redundancy and efficiency it is recommended in most networks. DNS can be configured in different ways, but if you are using Active Directory, AD Integrated would be recommended.

As for an application that is able to monitor services a program called IP Monitor is a good option.

http://www.ipmonitor.com

Ian Bagnald
MCSE:Security Windows 2000
MCSA:Security Windows 2000
COMPTIA A+

 

[William Stacey [MVP]]

This behavior is strange. I would start looking at OS level and service
packs. Maybe some dlls got mixed up causing dns to crash heavy. You could
also setup a "clean" dns server and use that as primary dns to test this
idea without having to do a bunch of diag on first dns server.