Thanks John that all makes sense.

I have seen the root hints before in
the DNS setup. Is recursion not used by default though? If it were, why
would we ever fail finding our internet sites when these forwarder sites are
not working? We wouldnt! So it must not be enabled by default. I will go
back to the root hints and check that out shortly. I would be glad to get
rid of the forwarders altogether. I will also be very glad to enhance my
knowledge on DNS servers in the future.
What is really kicking my butt at work right now is all of our branches
different subnets. That coupled with the Computer Browser service seeing PCs
in Network Neighborhood. ugh. I need to be more educated in these areas.
Especially the Computer Browser thing. I know it's a service that can be
enabled and you can designate Master browsers but it still doesnt seem to
work. I even found it's settings in the registry to modify but to no avail.
Certain PCs see others on the Network neighborhood and others "just dont"
see anything but themselves. Stupid things haha
"John R" <jsr^^^813@zoom^^^internet.net> wrote in message
news:%...
>
> "Keith Chilton" <> wrote in message
> news:%...
>> We just use the DNS servers given to us because that is what works, not
>> because we're being impolite. If nothing is in the DNS forwarders, how do
>> you get your DNS requests to access the Internet? You said something
>> about recursive resolution so I'm sure that has to do with it. Do you
>> just put the IP address of yourself in the forwarder section? I've never
>> attempted that. I just don't know DNS in great detail but I plan on
>> learning it much more thoroughly pretty soon. Thanks John!
>>
>>>
>>> As I recall, when we setup one of our WAN connections, the ISP gave us
>>> the addresses of a couple of their DNS servers that we could use if we
>>> wanted. But, like most companies, we had our own. We didn't want to
>>> have to get them involved everytime we wanted to put a new hostname up,
>>> or change the address of our mail server. Once your registered name (if
>>> you have one) is associated with your IP, the ISPs DNSs are simply a
>>> freebee, not a requirement. Your DNS servers are more than capable of
>>> recursive resolution, there is nothing special about the ISPs. If you
>>> want, point your DNS forwarders to their servers and let their servers
>>> do the work. However, that is considered impolite by most people, even
>>> if it does conserver a little bandwidth on your end.
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>
> When you setup DNS, you can have it do recursive resolution, or you can
> have it forward the request to another DNS server. Let's look at each.
> (Learning DNS can take a whole book, this is the reader's digest condensed
> version, with a lot of points left out).
>
> If your DNS does recursion, and your client submits a request for
> 'www.xyz.com', your DNS will check it's cache to see if it has cached the
> address for that. If not, then your DNS will have something called "root
> hints" to contact a root server who is authorative for the ".com" domain.
> Your DNS will then contact that DNS to find out where xyz.com is. Your
> DNS will then contact that DNS for the host record for 'www.xyz.com'.
> Then, your DNS will cache the result and return that result to you so that
> your client can contact the host. This process of finding the desired
> host is called recursion.
>
> If you like, you can setup your DNS to point to a 'forwarder'. So, if
> your DNS is not authorative for 'xyz.com' and does not have 'xyz.com' or
> 'www.xyz.com' cached, it will forward the request to another DNS server
> who will go through the recursion process for you and return the
> resolution of 'www.xyz.com' to your DNS server, who then caches it and
> returns it to the client..
>
> Sometimes, if you have multiple DNS servers in your organization, it would
> not be unusual for all of them to forward requests to a single
> well-connected DNS server (either your's, or someone else's) to do
> recursive lookups and simply return the result. This minimizes the DNS
> traffic on your LAN/WAN since you don't have multiple DNS servers doing
> recursive lookups all over the place. In all cases, DNS servers will
> cache whatever they find out (either through recursion or through the
> result of a forwarded request) so that they don't have to do that again if
> they don't have to. Now you get into TTL times, etc, but I digress.
>
> In a nutshell, that is a brief outline of how DNS works. Again, there are
> lots of other things about DNS such as zones, zone replications, yada
> yada, but this should explain what I meant. When you get to the MCSA/MCSE
> core tests, you will study this in much much more detail.
>
> John
>