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4.3 The DNS Console
To manage a Microsoft DNS
Server and maintain your DNS data, you'll use a tool
called the DNS console, a snap-in for the
Microsoft Management Console (MMC). MMC is a general-purpose program
that hosts administrative tools. Introduced in Windows 2000, MMC
replaced the "one-off"
administrative tools found in Windows NT 4.0, such as DNS Manager,
WINS Manager, DHCP Manager, and the like. The DNS console has a
graphical user interface and is capable of managing multiple name
servers. The DNS console is located on the Administrative Tools menu, provided
you've already installed the DNS Server. The DNS
console communicates with the Microsoft DNS Server using a
proprietary management protocol built on Microsoft's
RPC (remote procedure call) mechanism. That means the DNS console is
able to manage only Microsoft DNS Servers and not other name servers,
such as BIND.The main DNS console window looks like Figure 4-6
(or will look like it, after we've set everything up
in the course of this chapter).
Figure 4-6. The DNS console main window
The left pane is called the console tree. It
shows name servers, zones, and domains. The right pane shows either
informational messages or resource records.This particular DNS console knows about only one name server,
terminator. That name server is authoritative
for three zones: movie.edu,
249.249.192.in-addr.arpa, and
253.253.192.in-addr.arpa. The DNS console
segregates forward-lookup zones (which hold
primarily address records) and reverse-lookup
zones (which hold primarily pointer records). If any of
these zones had subdomains, they would show up as subfolders under
the appropriate zone. For example,
comedies.movie.edu would be represented as a
folder called comedies under
movie.edu.Let's take a look at the menus at the top of the
window. The File, Window, and Help menus control the MMC application itself
and, to be honest, they're not that interesting. The
File menu has just two choices:
Options and
Exit. Options has a
single window that lets you reset any changes you've
made to the DNS console's configuration. This window
has no effect on the settings of any name servers managed by the DNS
console, however; name server configuration is stored separately from
DNS console configuration. The Window menu has the expected options to manage
MMC subwindows, but you'll find that all the DNS
administrative action happens in a single window for the DNS console.
Choosing New Window produces another
DNS console window; we haven't found a need to have
more than one DNS console window open, but you might find multiple
windows useful. Finally, the Help
menu has the usual suspects: Help
Topics brings up the MMC help system, which offers quick
jumps to help with the MMC application and the DNS console.The Action and View menus are included in all MMC snap-ins.
The really important commands are in the Action menu: add new name servers, create
zones and domains, and create resource records. You can also delete
objects and view object properties. We'll explain
the various commands throughout this chapter.But
let's take a moment to go over the choices on the
View menu. Since this is a standard
MMC menu, not all the options are useful with the DNS console. For
example, Choose Columns allows you
to customize the columns in the right pane. That's
nice, except that they don't need customization. In
our opinion, you'll always want to see all available
columns in whatever DNS console view you're looking
at. The next set of choices is Large
Icons, Small Icons,
List, and Detail, and the selection determines the
display format in the right pane. We recommend choosing Detail when you first start the DNS console
and leaving the view that way forever; otherwise, you
don't necessarily see all the columns and the useful
information displayed in them.Next is Advanced, which toggles
between a more basic, or beginner's, view and an
advanced view more suitable for you DNS experts out there. Windows
Server 2003 has fewer differences between advanced and nonadvanced
views. The main difference is whether or not the DNS console displays
some additional information in the console tree on the left. Advanced
mode shows an icon allowing access to the name
server's cache of records from previous lookups.
We'll talk more about the name
server's cache later in this chapter.The Filter selection brings up a dialog box like
the one shown in Figure 4-7. Filtering is handy
when you've got a really large zone with hundreds or
even thousands of resource records. Rather than displaying them all
in the righthand pane, you can limit the display with this option.
Figure 4-7. Filter dialog box
Customize is another standard choice
on the View menu. It controls which
MMC menus and toolbars appear. We recommend leaving these options at
their default settings, as shown in Figure 4-8,
since those settings are optimal.
Figure 4-8. Customize dialog box
But enough about the DNS
console's generic
knobs and switches. Let's move on to some DNS
administrative tasks.
