DNS primary and secondary IP

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Guys quick question..

Kinda chatting with a colleague of mine regarding what should you use for primary and secondary DNS IP's?

For example I have a server named companyA with IP 192.168.10.50 and a companyB with IP 192.168.10.51 both servers are domain controllers and both are DNS servers with integrated zones. I usually set the primary DNS IP on each server to 127.0.0.1 and the secondary DNS IP of the other DC. A colleague of mine believes that it is better practice to do the opposite, set the primary DNS server to the other DC and secondary to itself.

What do you guys usually do?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

We point our DNS back at themselves for DNS.

 

Our DC's are DNS servers themselves and integrated zones. Well to be honest as there are likely to be more than one DC then you have redundancy and very unlikely all DC's would go down at the same time.

 

I usually point first DNS at itself and the second one at the second server. I don't use loopback address though. I remember reading somewhere that it's better to use server IP address than the loopback one. Why? I don't know. Is it true? I don't know. Got nothing to back it up. Just remember seeing or reading it somewhere.

Might not be the case though.

 

I always point dns servers to themselves first, theres TBH probably a use case for doing it the other way, but I've always thought and read that its more sensible to do name resolution locally on dns servers. Why design in extra network traffic when you dont have too.

 

I think the advice for putting another server as the primary IP was to do with the speed of how the zones loaded etc on older versions of Windows server. These days they can be up and running before there would/could be an issue with enhancements to the Windows DNS service such as the background loading etc.

 

Thanks for the replies guys

I personally don't see the need to use another DNS server as a primary DNS when you can point to yourself for DNS queries. Chris you made a good point. I guess if there some software that is installed on the DC that must have DNS working properly at all times even at reboots, then maybe the other method is the way to go.. But from my experience and judging by the replies I got here, it seems like using itself for DNS seems the way to go, even though the other way might work too.