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Monday 7 December 2009

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;

Name Type IP

Now, in my case I was fortunate enough to have a spreadsheet available with our server names and IP’s. Using this I created a list of the server names, followed by the type, in this case “A” and the IP addresses. It was then just a case of copying the list from Excel and pasting below the last entry in the DNS Zone file, and saving.

Now go back to DNS Manager, and reload the zone. So long as there have been no formatting errors etc. the zone should lode with the imported entries.

If all is OK, and the Zone was AD integrated, go back and re-enable AD integration (Reversal of earlier explanation) and your imported data will replicate away with the DNS servers selected.

Please note, I would only recommend this is you have a great number of entries to add, if just a few, stick to the standard manual entry.

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