Questions about Bind and AD dns integration

Gordon A. Lang glang at goalex.com
Tue May 6 21:12:11 UTC 2008


The short answer to your question is "yes."

We use BIND exclusively in an AD environment, and it works very nicely.
In our environment, all of the dynamic updates for forward (A and SRV)
records as well as all the reverse (PTR) records all go to the same BIND
server acting as master for all zones.  But if you want to have some
zones on one server and other zones on a different server, you can do
that -- with BIND or non-BIND DNS servers -- by simply delegating the
sub-domains into sub-zones.

You cannot, however, split a single domain to have part of it homed on
one server and another part homed on a different server, which you might
be hoping to do for the reverse DNS.  But don't need to as long as you
don't mind if the updates are insecure, or else you don't mind going
through great pains to integrate GSS-TSIG with BIND.

As long as you are clear on the point that zone delegation is an all-
or-nothing proposition, the key for the dynamic DNS to work is setting
the MNAME field of the SOA correctly, which means that for each zone,
the MNAME must be set to the FQDN (with trailing dot) of the master DNS
server for that zone.

Let me explain about the insecure dynamic updates: The BIND server
doesn't work with the GSS-TSIG (at least not out of the box), so we
considered using TSIG, which does work with BIND.  But the amount of
work that would be required to setup the TSIG on each of the servers
needing dynamic DNS was more than we were willing to do, so we decided
simply to *not* use secure updates.  This is safe because everything is
behind a firewall.  As a perfectly acceptable compromise, we use ACL's
in BIND to control whose updates are allowed (the allow-update option).

We setup the DHCP server to perform all forward and reverse DNS for
workstations (and other DHCP clients), and we really do not need dynamic
DNS for any other servers that have static ip address assignments with
the notable exception of the AD domain controllers, the MS Cluster
servers, and the KMS servers, so the allow-update list includes a
relatively small number of hosts.

This architecture works better (in terms of trouble-free operation and
ease of administration) that the MS DNS servers, and it has proven to be
a very good choice for us.  I do wish we could get the GSS-TSIG to work
for secure dynamic updates, but as I said we are content with this one
compromise.  But there is one more detail I must mention:

During certain MS server maintenance steps performed according to MS
recommendations, the unnecessary DHCP client has been removed from
virtually all of our servers, and on the nights that this was done, the
affected servers lost their forward and reverse DNS records.  The reason
for this is that the DHCP client, on its dying breath, removes those
records.  So we needed to manually re-add the records the next day.
This problem did not occur when the allow-update option did not allow
updates from those servers.  So it is important to set the allow-update
option!!!

And, lastly, I must say that this architecture suffers from a major
single-point-of-failure flaw.  We are investigating an option whereby
the MNAME resolves to an IP address that is a virtual address which
stably binds to a base master server, but in the event of a failure, a
stand-by master server can take over the virtual address.  The obvious
difficulty is trying to maintain state between the base master and the
stand-by master.  If we use our IPAM system (that tries to keep track of
the dynamic DNS via also-notify which prompts ixfr's), we will typically
lose some data, but it would be better than ceasing to function.  We are
hoping, though, to find a more robust solution for BIND multi-master.

I'm not the first to express this desire -- hopefully some day it will
become more important the DNSSEC.

--
Gordon A. Lang

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Simon Gao" <gao at schrodinger.com>
To: <bind-users at isc.org>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 7:15 PM
Subject: Questions about Bind and AD dns integration


> Hi,
> 
> We are running Bind as name servers for our internal and public network. 
> Now we need to bring AD online. We assign AD a sub domain for AD dns 
> servers to manage, like ad.corp.com. However, we run into one problem 
> with reverse dns setting since all hosts are on the same network. 
> Currently, reverse map is not set to allow dynamic update and we want to 
> keep it that way.
> 
> One option is set up AD dns as primary server for reverse maps and 
> transfer them to the Bind servers, or set up forwarders pointing to AD 
> dns servers Anyone see any problem with such setup?
> 
> Is it possible to set up a sub domain on Bind to allow Windows DC and 
> clients to do dynamic update to service locator records?
> 
> Simon
>



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