Microsoft windows 2000 DNS manual Interoperability Issues, Using Wins and Winsr Records

DESIGNING A DNS NAMESPACE FOR THE ACTIVE DIRECTORY

hardware components can provide information and notification of events. WMI simplifies the instrumentation of various drivers and applications written for Windows, provides detailed and extensible information that is consistent across different vendors' products, and allows for consistent access to Windows instrumentation from non-Windows environments.

Among other services, WMI supports the monitoring and management of the DNS servers, zones and records. It allows enlisting and modification of the DNS servers and zones properties, enumeration of the zones and resource records, update of the resource records and creation of the new zones. The WMI allows an administrator writing an automated application managing the DNS objects. The WMI method provider enables these applications to invoke methods that are defined on the DNS server.

Interoperability Issues

In this section the issues that may arise when Microsoft DNS servers are used in the mixed environment with non-Microsoft DNS servers are discussed. Because it is RFC compliant, the Microsoft DNS server is fully interoperable with all other RFC compliant DNS servers. However, since the Microsoft DNS server provides a wider spectrum of features than specified in the RFC, the user is advised to exercise caution using these features. These features are limited to the use of WINS and WINSR resource records (as they are specified in the Windows NT 4.0 DNS white paper) and to the use of the UTF-8 character encoding.

Using WINS and WINSR Records

Since currently only Microsoft DNS servers support the WINS and WINSR resource records we recommend disabling replication of these records if all following conditions are satisfied:

•the primary copy of the zone contains one of these records;

•at least one of the secondaries resides on the non-Microsoft DNS server.

At the same time, if the secondaries reside partially on Microsoft and non-Microsoft DNS servers, disabling WINS and WINSR resource records replication may require manual input of these records to the secondary zones residing on the Microsoft DNS servers.

Using UTF-8 Characters Format

The Windows 2000 DNS server can be configured to allow or disallow the use of UTF-8 characters on a per-server or per-zone basis. A non-UTF-8-aware DNS server may accept a zone transfer of a zone containing UTF-8 names, but it may not be able to write back those names to a zone file or reload those names from a zone file. Administrators should exercise caution when transferring a zone containing UTF-8 names to a non-UTF-8-aware DNS server.

Windows 2000 White Paper

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