DNS woes

[ngrayson]

I have a problem and I have managed to confuse myself.

I use two ISP’s one during the day and one at night each has their own DNS. So far this has worked OK but the other day I decided to use DHCP in my network so I turned it on.

On the dialer connectoids, I have tried both entering the DNS IP addresses manually and used automatic assignment.

On my private LAN card, should I enable DNS or not? If so do I just enter my machine name or do I also enter its own IP address (as this is the gateway).

Then under the DNS/Wins resolver, do I also enter the DNS addresses?

Then under the DHCP, I can should I choose enter the server names again.

Last night, using gate keeper, I did notice that at times, when I looked at a web site, it worked OK and sometimes, the administrator account would kick in and generate session after session of DNS lookup in the activity window (I suspect a DNS loop).

So I deleted the entries in the WINS/DNS resolver and now it dials but does not work so I assume its not resolving any longer.

Can you give me a step 1,2,3 guide please.

Also, as a matter of curiosity, there is now a window which says internal system activity. What is this supposed to display?

[Nev]

Also, as a matter of curiosity, there is now a window which says internal system activity. What is this supposed to display?

You will see what is processed behind the scenes in this window: Mail being sent, scheduled tasks for example.

Nev.

[kgoodknecht]

> I use two ISP’s one during the day and one at night each has their own DNS. So far this has worked OK but the other day I decided to use DHCP in my network so I turned it on.

It generally does not matter what your ISP is for DNS most are in the same ICANN Root use the fastest DNS server you can find regardless of ISP.
you can use Dig or Netdig http://www.mvptools.com to test DNS speed.

The preferred forwarding DNS servers I recommend is 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 they are extremely fast and even in the UK you should get good speed out of them they usually answer under 200 ms on the first query and under 100 ms if the NS records are in cache.

> On the dialer connectoids, I have tried both entering the DNS IP addresses manually and used automatic assignment.

>On my private LAN card, should I enable DNS or not?

If using DHCP you should get the DNS address DHCP is assigning for DNS without this. If you enable DNS you have to manually enter DNS addresses.

If so do I just enter my machine name or do I also enter its own IP address (as this is the gateway).

I suppose your referring to the pop up the Win9x gives you?

Yes, use your machine name

If using DHCP you should get the address defined in the scope for DNS on you machines. run ipconfig /all to verify

> Then under the DNS/Wins resolver, do I also enter the DNS addresses?

Yes, but as I said use the fastest regardless of your ISP, and make sure the DNS address you use is for a recursive DNS server, some ISP's disable recursion on the DNS server they use to host authoritative zones on.

If you use Dig or Netdig to test for the fastest DNS server look for the ra bit in the flags section:
flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 12, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

If the rd bit is not folowed by an ra bit do not use it for DNS.

If you use nslookup use the d2 option to see the flags.

> Then under the DHCP, I can should I choose enter the server names again.

In DHCP it is best if you put in the IP of the Wingate server for DNS, unless you are using Active Directory.

[adrien]

One other thing.

If you are running WinGate's DNS server, then avoid putting the WinGate machine's IP into your OS DNS configuration.

WinGate enumerates all the DNS servers that the local machine knows about, and uses them. This way it picks up DNS servers allocated by your ISP to dialups.

If you have a DNS server specified in the DNS configuration of any network adapter, then WinGate will put that in its list of servers to use as well. This means if you tell your NIC to use WinGate for DNS, then WinGate can end up asking itself, causing a loop.

WinGate chooses which of its known servers to use based on responsiveness, so depending on what other servers are known, or how they are performing, it could take a while before WinGate got around to using the one that could cause a loop (i.e. itself). This is why loops aren't always immediately apparent. The latest version of WGOptions.exe (shipped with WinGate) allows you to specify IP addresses of DNS server NOT to use. This is useful to break loops, especially between AD servers and WinGate where they both forward to each other.

DNS in windows is a bit weird. In earlier versions of windows, even though there are DNS settings per adapter, they are actually global settings. So you could have DNS disabled on one adapter, and enabled on another, and DNS would still be available. DNS isn't really a per-adapter thing, but I think MS put it in there for lack of a better place. Also dialups required special treatment I guess.

So in short, if you have DNS enabled on an external adapter, you don't need to enable it on an internal one for win98.

Adrien