Hello All,

I am either having trouble understanding how DNS works, or I am having trouble configuring my DNS correctly (either one isn't good). I am currently working with a domain, I'll call it webdomain.com, and I need to allow all of our internal users to get out to dotster to get our public DNS entries just like the rest of the world. Then, on top of that, I want to be able to supply just a few override DNS entries for testing servers and equipment that is not available publically. As an example:

• public.webdomain.com - should get this from dotster

• outside.webdomain.com - should get this from dotster as well

• testing.webdomain.com - should get this from my internal dns controller

The problem that I seem to be running into at every turn is that if I have an internal DNS controller that contains a zone for webdomain.com then I can get my specified internal entries but never get anything from the public DNS server. This holds true regardless of the type of DNS server I use also--I have tried both a Linux Bind9 and a Windows 2008 Domain Controller.

I guess my big question is: am I being unreasonable to think that a system should be able to check my specified internal DNS and in the case where a requested entry doesn't exist it should fail over to the specified public dns server -OR- is this just not the way DNS works and I am lost in the sauce?

It seems like it should be as simple as telling my internal DNS server to forward any requests that it can't fulfill to dotster, but that doesn't seem to work. Could this be a firewall issue?

Thanks in advance