Samba 4 domains and DNS replication

Hi all,

This is a bit of a brain dump so that I don’t forget this little tidbit in future.

Scenario

You have a shiny new Samba 4 active domain controller (or two) responsible for the domain ad.youroffice.example.com.  You have a couple of DNS servers that are responsible for non-AD parts of the domain and the parent youroffice.example.com.  To have everything go through one place, you’ve set up these servers with slave domains for ad.youroffice.example.com.

Joining your first Windows 7 client yields a message like this one.  You’re able to resolve yourdc.ad.youroffice.example.com on the client but not the _msdcs subdomain.

The fix

Configure your slaves to also sync _msdcs.ad.youroffice.example.com.

Example using bind

zone "vrtad.youroffice.example.com" {
        type slave;
        file "/var/lib/bind/db.ad.youroffice.example.com";
        masters { 10.20.30.1; 10.20.30.2; };
        allow-notify { 10.20.30.1; 10.20.30.2; };
};

zone "_msdcs.ad.youroffice.example.com" {
        type slave;
        file "/var/lib/bind/db._msdcs.ad.youroffice.example.com";
        masters { 10.20.30.1; 10.20.30.2; };
        allow-notify { 10.20.30.1; 10.20.30.2; };
};

Tags: active-directorycomputingdnsdns-replicationsamba4