I finally got windows DNS up and running on my Windows Home Server after putting it off for a year or so.   It seems trivial, but I view it as one more configuration item to recreate after a rebuild.   I hope that my current WHS lasts about forever (I built it with 3 to 5 years in mind) but the system drive could always fail – not to mention that WHS2 should be out before too long.  Once WHS is 64 bit, I’ll consolidate my main VMware Server instance onto it and it will be nice to be down to basically one server in the house.

Anyway, I had a couple challenges, but mostly those were due to configurations across my two networks (one behind the G router, the other behind the N router.)  The long term solution is to flip both of those into AP mode and do all my configuration on the SMC gateway but that is an undertaking for another day.  The other was related to flushing the dns cache on the DNS server itself.  Seems obvious, right?  Well, I wasted about twenty minutes before I caught on to it.

I switched over to OpenDNS for my external DNS servers and that seems to have sped up internet browsing a touch.

The last thing to do is to have DHCP append a domain (so atlas will be atlas.jhome) to PC’s and then setup a zone for that on my DNS server.  That way name resolution will be tidier and I can setup reverse zones and such.

And the next last thing to do is to setup another windows host for dns so I don’t have to worry about maitnenance activities upsetting our LAN and internet access.

It just never ends!

–Nat