CREATE A FORWARD LOOKUP ZONE IN MICROSOFT DNS SERVER 2012 R2

Let’s visualize this: when you log into your Windows Client computer, you are provided with an IP address from the DHCP server. The DHCP server also provides a DNS server setting to allow your client computer to perform name lookup. To find out what your local IP address and DNS server is, at the Windows command prompt, type

ipconfig /all

In my case, the IP address is 192.168.1.14 (statically set) and the DNS Server is 192.168.1.12. This DNS server is my Lab Windows 2012 DNS Server (Active Directory).

The DNS Server has one forward lookup zone called DALARIS.LOCAL. To launch the DNS server console, at the command prompt, type:

dnsmgmt.msc followed by pressing the Enter key.

When we ping a host that does not exsits in DNS (for example, your lab network that you do not have it in DNS yet) such as webserver.myhometestlab.com there will be no replies from ping.

Now we wold like to create a forward lookup zone called myhometestlab.com. After we have the zone in place, we can add a host record (A record) called webserver.myhometestlab.com to point to an IP address.

In DNS Server Management Console, right-click Forward Lookup Zone, then click New Zone.

At the Welcome screen, click Next.

Choose Primary Zone and click Next.

Choose to allow replication to all DNS servers in the domain DALARIS.LOCAL and then click Next.

Enter the Zone name as myhometestlab.com and click Next.

Choose to allow secure dynamic updates and click Next.

Click Finish.

As you can see, the new zone is now created.

Let’s create the webserver.myhometestlab.com record. Right click on the zone name and choose new host (A or AAAA) record.

Enter the host name (do not include the .myhometestlab.com part), also enter the IP address of the host and click the Add Host button.

As you can see a new host is now created.

Flush DNS to update the changes.

Ping the host to verify that we get a reply from the host.

In this blog post, we have gone through the needs for a new DNS Zone and the process of creating one. We also tested our configuration and saw that we successfully ping the newly created host.