I had to bring down my main PDC emulator for emergeny maintenance. It is my
main DNS servers. However, I have another 16 DC's running on my domain all
with DNS. My client could not connect to the internet, receive email, etc
.... Shouldn't the DNS servers pick when the main one is down ? Do I have
input that info DHCP for every DC on my domain ? New statements in my
routers ? I am looking for any kind of insight on this.

Thanks,

Paul

With this many DCs I assume that your AD domain covers multiple sites.

If at all possible, you should transfer the Operation Master roles off a DC
before it is taken down. If it crashes and is going to be down for a while,
you can seize the Operation Master roles. But I don't think that has
anything to do with your name resolution problem.

To have AD name resolution to work. . .

Clients in each site should use a local DC/DNS as their primary DNS server.
If there are more than two DC/DNS server in a site, then one of the others
should be their Secondary DNS server. If not, choose a secondary DNS server
from a site that is close (fastest WAN link).

All DCs/DNS severs should have the PDC Emulator as their Primary DNS and
themselves as their secondary DNS.

To have Internet name resolution to work. . .

If each site has their own direct Internet access, I like to have each
DC/DNS server resolve Internet names themselves. But if only the main site
has Internet access and all other sites access the Internet by first
transversing the WAN link, I would use fowarders (as in more than one). At
each site you can select a single DC/DNS server as the bridghead DNS server
for that site. All other DNS servers in the site can forward to it and to
the DNS bridgehead server at the main site.

Each site's bridghead DNS server will forward to the main site's DNS
bridgehead server and to an ISP's DNS server.

The main site's DNS bridgehead server can either resove all Internet names
itself or forward to two ISP DNS servers.



"Paul Cannon" <PaulCannon@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:20EAD2C4-50E4-4DBE-9F20-68D21EAC01B4@microsoft.com...
>I had to bring down my main PDC emulator for emergeny maintenance. It is
>my
> main DNS servers. However, I have another 16 DC's running on my domain
> all
> with DNS. My client could not connect to the internet, receive email, etc
> ... Shouldn't the DNS servers pick when the main one is down ? Do I have
> input that info DHCP for every DC on my domain ? New statements in my
> routers ? I am looking for any kind of insight on this.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paul
>