DNS Zones

A DNS Zone can be defined as a contiguous part of a name space for which a server has been assigned authority. A server can have authority for a multiple zones and a single Zone can have multiple domains. For example, a single server can have the authority for the sample.com zone as well as the example.com zone and each of these zones can have multiple domains.

The related domains such as .com , sample.com and mycompany.com.sample.com can ve converted into zones by using delegation.

Two different types of zones can be created viz; Forward look up zone and reverse look up zone. In forward look up zone zones, the Dns server map FQDN with the IP addresses and it is vice -versa in reverse look up zones.Therefore , queries for resolving FQDNs to IP addresses are answered by forward look up zones and reverse look up zones answer queries to resolve IP addresses to FQDNs.The New zone can wizard is used for creating a new forward or reverse look up zone. In both the cases, you create a new zone by right clickingt the server for which you want to create a new zone and then selecting the new zone option. This will launch the New zone wizard. However, you can create New zones using the configuration a DNS server wizard.

There are three Zone types :

1) Primary zones : Provides the source of all zones with in a domain. Using the data from this zone , a secondary zone can be created and used as a backup.

2) Secondary zones : Contains a backup for the primary zone.

3) Stub Zones : Contains only those resource record those are necessary to identify the servers authoratiove for the master zone.