Introduction to Using DNS Server on Windows Server 2012

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy and today's class is introduction to using DNS server on Windows Server 2012 now I had to wrack my brain for like half an hour to figure out a name that would be appropriate for teaching you guys this class now it's very important that you guys understand this is an introduction class and it's only for using DNS server within the Windows Server 2012 environment we are not going to go over a lot about Windows DNS server today basically I have been trying to walk you along in these classes so you can very slowly and comfortably build your own Active Directory Windows 2012 servers now we have gotten to the point we need to start talking about DNS and show you how to interact with the DNS control panel the problem is the problem is I've been sitting here and I've been reading you know the big the big orange book and another big green book and trying to figure out the information that you guys need to know for DNS and the issue is is that a lot of the ways that classes teach DNS Microsoft Windows DNS um they try to give you too much information at the exact same time they try to give you too much high level information that you don't understand and then that kind of confuses everything for you so DNS is a vital infrastructure component to a Windows Server architecture so DNS is basically one of the glues that binds the internet and all tcp/ip networking together now so what DNS does is it Maps fully-qualified domain names or host names to IP addresses that is incredibly vital that is incredibly important that's that's just very very very very thing well the thing is is that basic the basic DNS concepts that you need to understand to get a basic DNS server up and running are pretty simple you don't need a lot of information but if you're going to go into the enterprise environment where you have numerous DNS servers running where you have security concerns when you have when you have offices throughout the world the DNS configurations for doing that can get very complicated very quick well the problem is is if I try to dump all of this information into one ball and give it to you you're going to get confused because we haven't dealt with sites yet we haven't dealt with replication we haven't dealt with security we haven't dealt with any of those things so I try to start trying to explain to you guys the high level DNS stuff right now then you're going to get confused and then you're not going to learn what it is you need to learn and then it's all just gonna be a complete mess so what I'm showing you today is just the basic DNS concepts you need for Windows Server 2012 and then in the future once we've created domain controllers once we have done other things we will come back to DNS and we will get more sophisticated with it so that that's what we're going to be talking about today so the core of what DNS does DNS Maps domain names to IP addresses we've talked about this a lot so remember computers really don't care about domain names they don't care about server or cnn.com that doesn't really mean a whole lot to a computer with a computer cares about is 192.168.1.2 or 208 60 6.50 5.4 the computer cares about the IP addresses so with the DNS servers do is they map the domain name to the IP address so before we can create an Active Directory domain controllers as I've talked about we have to make sure that DHCP is running on our network and DNS is running on the network so now what we're doing today is we're going to go in and we're going to take a little look at the DNS to make sure everything is working the important thing with this class today is basically so that you sit down at a server you can open up the des DNS control panel and you can go yep it all seems to be working that's what we're going to be trying to do here today so basically what I'm going to show you so I'm going to show you the log files I'm going to show you a little bit of maintenance just so you know how it works about how it cleared the DNS cache how to restart the DNS service how to scabbit the database if you need to clean it up and then we're all I'm also going to show you how to manually add a a hostname to IP address record in the DNS in case you need it in case you have some type of legacy device on the network that that can't talk to the DNS server and you need to plug let's say you need to put in a network printer so you need to say that printer equals 192.168.1.2 that's what I'm going to show you so let's go onto the computer right now so I can show you this stuff again this is all simple we're not we're gonna go to starts of authority we're not going to worry about zones we're not going to worry about PT RS and all that we're just basically just worrying about the simple stuff that you guys need to understand in order for us to go to the next class where we are actually going to create a domain controller in an active directory system so we are sitting here at my 2012 server and I have server manager already open so in case you forgot basically you go down the lower left hand corner you click on this little toolbox and whatever thing here and that opens server manager now server manager will take a couple seconds maybe up to a minute for everything to populate so if you click on server manager and you know you've already installed DNS you've already installed the HCP and you've already installed Active Directory if you don't see those things on the left-hand side just wait a minute and then they'll show up now when we're going to go over as I showed you with DHCP if we go over and we click on the little DNS button over here when as I told you what the ACP we're not going to get a whole lot of information basically all this is going to tell us is yep ENS is on line so it's very again where I talk about user interface issues with Microsoft this is kind of weird you would think if you clicked on this you would get some some type of control panel you don't basically all you're getting is the log file so down at the bottom will show you events if you had me but you don't have any so if we are going to be administrating that the DNS server on this server what we need to do is we need to go up to tools we click on Tools and then this gives us all the tools for the services that are unsolved on the server all we need to do is we need to go down to DNS and this will give us the control panel in order to actually interact with the DNS server so when this opens up we get a nice MMC control panel the Microsoft management console control panel just likely like we will for just about anything that we're going to be doing we can see that we're in DNS and then under it we can see our server name so the reason this is called server right here is because in fact I named this server server so that's why this is called server if you named this the server Pluto it would say Pluto right there if I click on the little left drop-down we will get some different options here now again we are going to skip most of these options for today now the first thing that we're going to do is around look if we right click on the server icon we right click on the server icon we are going to get some information or some some options here now basically there are only three options that I want you to worry about right at this time the first one here is a cool little tool that right now you probably won't need frankly you probably probably don't need it very often at all even in an enterprise environment it's called scavenge stale resource records what this does is let's say you have a lab environment and you're throwing up lots of computers and you're pulling down Lots and computers and you're doing a whole bunch of wacky crap right and all of that information goes DNS records and after a while after two or three days of throwing up servers and tearing down servers and all that all the records basically with DNS things start getting messed up so names start getting mapped to addresses that no longer exist names that shouldn't be there are still there basically you just get blow on your DNS tail if you click this scavenge stale resource records what this will do is it will go through and it will try to clean up all of those bad old records for you so that you won't have any problems so again I'm not really sure how hard you have to hammer the server to actually really need to do this but it is possible for you guys if you again if you're throwing up a hundred hundred workstations and you're adding DNS records and all that you may need to do this possibly the next one that you may need to do is clear cache so this option here clears the cache now if you have multiple DNS servers and they are all talking to each other then the DNS servers may store information DNS records in cache so instead of having to ask a higher level DNS server for information every single time this server needs it it will ask for at once it will then store that information in cache for a certain amount of time and instead of continuously asking the higher level DNS server it will simply hold that and when local computers are asking for a record it will go to that information that is in cache well especially if you're in a live environment and you're changing a lot of things there a lot many times information in that cache will be outdated and so your DNS server will be giving bad information to the local computers so if you're making big changes I would say every once in a while go in here and do this clear cache to make sure this hasn't cached information that is now bad so that's the whole thing at one time the information was good but you're doing so many modifications to the network it is now bad and it's causing all kinds of problems now the final thing just because this is the windows world you should always know how to do this so we go down to all tasks we can go and we can see that we have the ability to start stop pause or restart the DNS service so remember all these programs on a server are services and sometimes you need to restart those services if you make any modifications to them when and that you know when they say when in doubt reboot for a normal computer well when in doubt and you're messing around with the server restart so if you make any modifications to a server service it's always a good idea unless there's a reason not to simply to restart the service to make sure that all the configurations have been picked up and it's not missing anything I've pulled out what little hair I've had left back in the old days when I would make modifications to a server service I would forget to restart the service and then nothing would work right the reason was is because I hadn't restarted the service all those configurations hadn't been pulled in and it was still using the old configurations and was all just bad so here we've got the scavenge stale resource records the clear cache and we have the restart these are all things that you may or may not need in the future now after that what we should go down to is we should go and we should look at the global logs the DNS events again this is not something you'll go to a lot but if you are having major errors with your DNS server event logs are always a good thing this looks like your normal Event Viewer I can click on whatever thing happened if I double click it will give me information so basically if you're having problems with your DNS server you can come here and you can try to figure out you know what is going on if you're having major major issues and then do a google search if you're having problems now past that you will see that there's a lot of other options here that you can play with but that we are not going to play with so conditional forwards trust points reverse look up zones that something we'll play with in the future but today all we are going to deal with is the forward look up zones so the forward look up zones this is what maps those domain names or host names to IP addresses we're going to skip over this first what is called a zone we're going to skip over this this is kind of like a global thing for the entire active directory structure basically we're just not going to mess with it what we're going to do is we're going to go down to eat ECG comm this is called a zone so I called this domain eat ECG comm when I created it so you come here to whatever domain you created so if you created test comm go to test comm whatever domain is and when you do that you are going to get some information over on the right hand side now again we're going to skip most of this information for today sites TCP UDP blah blah blah blah blah basically don't worry about any of that for today what we want to look at is basically here where we see our actual records so right here on this record this is how these records are stored that map though those host names or domain names to IP addresses so we can see that a computer named server so this computer actually server has a host host name a record so that that's the record that we're going to be dealing with and it points to 10.1 10.2 so server points to 10.1 10.2 and basically that it is a static IP address now as you get more and more and more and more computers on your network this list of domain name or names to IP addresses will increase inside so if you had a thousand different computers on this network that had contacted the DNS server that all that information would be here since I only have this one computer on the network right now that's why it only says server now if I wanted to add a record again let's say I have a printer let's say I have an old old old old HP LaserJet printer from I don't know 1998 kind of like the one I actually have in the corner and I want that on the network and I want people to be able to go to it using a domain name a name such as printer instead of having to use the IP address if I right-click on eat ECG comm or whatever your zone name is that's called a zone whatever that is I can go and I can create a new record so new host a or a aaaa and this will create a record so I want to create a record for printer and I will give an IP address of 10 10.1 10.50 now I don't check off anything else here we'll worry about those in different classes and now I can add hosts so it's been successfully created if we can see here so I've added this so printer now maps to 10.1 10.50 now if I pull up a command prompt now we can see that if I try to ping printer it will try to ping the IP address look 10.1 not 10.50 now since I don't actually have any printers there or any devices there is not going to respond but this is how that DNS mapping works so I said within DNS here printer equals 10.1 10.50 and then when I go to try to ping printer it in fact tries to ping n dot one dot 10.50 so this is the basic information you need to know to go forward at this time so that we can do other other projects again for all you experts out there that are watching my classes for some reason and always like to say that I'm I'm messing up what I want you guys to understand with this is that there is much more to deal with with DNS but if I try to explain it to you guys now I think it's going to go white road right over your head and you're not going to understand any of it the main thing I want you guys to understand is how to be able to go to the server how to know that DNA s is in fact installed on the server and how to go in and see those basic configuration so you can see the log files and you can see that forward look up zone so you can see does it have hostname to IP address information in there and if you are having problems let's say you're trying to ping a computer but it keeps returning the wrong IP address well you can go in now to the DNS and you can see oh I can see that that can be that that hostname is is being pointed to the wrong IP address let me go in there and edit it or change it this is just a basic concept for for DNS from here we can go and start to do some more complicated stuff that'll be really really really really fun in the future so as you know I am Eli this computer guy this was introduction to using DNS server on Windows Server 2012 as always I enjoyed teaching this class and I look forward to seeing on the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 527,920

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy

Id: 6c3mwjjr3AQ

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2013