DNS-Based Environment Determination

Posted by zvolkov on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by zvolkov
Published on 2010-06-17T16:57:13Z Indexed on 2010/06/17 17:03 UTC
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Found the following here. The questions is: where can I find more details on how exactly implement this on Windows? Any guide or how-to anybody? Or maybe you can provide your invaluable suggestions?

Specifically, how do I make so that "all QA servers would first resolve entries in qa.example.com first and then if that lookup failed they would try example.com" (I'm a dev, not a DNS specialist, but our IT Support has refused to help on this:()

Use DNS Based Environment Determination for your servers. Do this by initially splitting your top level domain into a number of sub domains depending on their function, and then creating DNS Service Names in each of the sub domains pointing to the relevant server for that service. Based on the list above we would then have:
* clientdb.prod.example.com for Production
* clientdb.perf.example.com for Performance Testing
* clientdb.qa.example.com for QA
* clientdb.dev.example.com for Development
Servers then resolve entries in their relevant sub domain by function. That is, all QA servers would first resolve entries in qa.example.com first and then if that lookup failed they would try example.com. This allows you to have a single configuration entry for your client database hostname (clientdb) that would resolve correctly in all environments. This technique has the added advantage of still having global services defined in a common top level domain.

This seems to be related to Providing "split horizon" DNS service. Reading that, I see that I will probably need separate DNS Server for each environment. Is this true or does Windows support some form of "tagging" the records to be visible depending on the requestor's IP?

DNS-Based Environment Determination

Posted by zvolkov on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by zvolkov
Published on 2010-06-17T16:20:08Z Indexed on 2010/06/17 17:03 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 404

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dns

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environment

Found the following here. The questions is: where can I find more details on how exactly implement this on Windows? Any guide or how-to anybody? Or maybe you can provide your invaluable suggestions?

Specifically, how do I make so that "all QA servers would first resolve entries in qa.example.com first and then if that lookup failed they would try example.com" (I'm a dev, not a DNS specialist, but our IT Support has refused to help on this:()

Use DNS Based Environment Determination for your servers. Do this by initially splitting your top level domain into a number of sub domains depending on their function, and then creating DNS Service Names in each of the sub domains pointing to the relevant server for that service. Based on the list above we would then have:
* clientdb.prod.example.com for Production
* clientdb.perf.example.com for Performance Testing
* clientdb.qa.example.com for QA
* clientdb.dev.example.com for Development
Servers then resolve entries in their relevant sub domain by function. That is, all QA servers would first resolve entries in qa.example.com first and then if that lookup failed they would try example.com. This allows you to have a single configuration entry for your client database hostname (clientdb) that would resolve correctly in all environments. This technique has the added advantage of still having global services defined in a common top level domain.

Here's one related (but not equivalent) SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/774490/dns-resolving-based-on-client-ip

This seems to be related to Providing "split horizon" DNS service. Reading that, I see that I will probably need separate DNS Server for each environment. Is this true or does Windows support some form of "tagging" the records to be visible depending on the requestor's IP?

Also, cross-posted on ServerFault

Developer IT