Windows Server DNS Zone Import

Following on from my previous Blog "windows server 2008 globalnames zone" , once the new zone was created I had to add all the NetBIOS names of our servers etc. Now being the lazy admin that I am, I could not bring myself to add them manually, so thought that there must be an easier way of doing so, and fortunately, after some head scratching there is.

The Zone in question was an Active Directory Integrated Zone, so the first job was to set this as not Active Directory Integrated. Easy enough, in DNS manager, right click the zone and click Properties, on the general tab, click change next to Type, and uncheck “store the zone in Active Directory”.

Once that is complete, navigate to C:\windows\system32\DNS and locate the file containing the local copy of the zone, this will be named the same as the zone you have just amended in DNS Manager, in my Case GlobalNames. Open this up with Notepad, and below the ZONE RECORDS heading you will see the DNS entries listed, these are in tab delimited format of;

Windows Server 2008 GlobalNames Zone

Since before time began, administrators have always had the pleasure of Dealing with WINS (windows Internet Naming Service) for name resolution within Windows Domains. Now although WINS works, generally, when it has problems such as replication, they can soon become a headache, particularly when a great number of servers are involved.

With server 2008, and now in R2, a new DNS (Domain Names System) zone was introduces called GlobalNames. This has been introduced as a replacement (at your peril) for WINS for NetBIOS names stored in DNS. Now this Zone is static, and all entries have to be manually added, and are not updated by clients etc.

Recently we had an issue with a NetBIOS name resolving to different IP’s from different clients. Adding to the headache was that different client OS’s gave different results also. After some time investigating the oddity, I decided to have a look at implementing Global Names.