Using Windows Server 2008 with Secondary DNS

The following information should help customers to configure their Windows Server 2008 (Standard Edition) DNS with our Secondary DNS service. Please note that this guide assumes you are already familiar with DNS in general as well as Windows Server 2008 DNS. (Please note: DynDNS.com cannot provide support for installation, setup or detailed configuration of servers.)

The first step is to configure your server to allow transfers from our Secondary DNS servers. Under your domain's Properties, click the Zone Transfers tab. The screen should look like the image below:

Zone Transfers Tab

Check the "Allow zone transfers" box and select "Only to the following servers". Our full list of Secondary DNS nameservers is:

Secondary DNS Nameservers

Server IP Address
ns2.mydyndns.org   (Required) 204.13.249.76
ns3.mydyndns.org 208.78.69.76
ns4.mydyndns.org 91.198.22.76
ns5.mydyndns.org 203.62.195.76

Enter this information into the appropriate location. When adding new nameservers to the list, it may attempt to perform validation against the given nameservers, which may fail (e.g. "No IPv6 address was found for this host"). You can see this screen below:

Allow Zone Transfers

You may ignore these warnings and continue.

Once the name servers have been added, click the "Notify..." button (seen in the first screenshot). This will bring up the Notify screen:

Nofiy

Check the "Automatically notify" box and select "The following servers," entering our Secondary DNS nameservers again. DNS Notify will cause your server to contact Secondary DNS, prompting each of our servers to retrieve a fresh copy of your zone file whenever a change occurs.

Your server should now notify Secondary DNS when your zone file has changed and allow our servers to retrieve the zone when necessary. To make sure your server is answering our zone transfer requests properly, you should ensure logging is enabled:

Logging

You can manually verify that our servers are providing the same records as your primary by performing a dig query against them and checking to ensure the SOA zone serial is the same across each nameserver. Here is an example using our dyn-dnssec.com domain:

$ dig dyn-dnssec.com +short soa @ns1.dyn-dnssec.com
ns1.dyn-dnssec.com. hostmaster.dyn-dnssec.com. 2009061601 10800 900 1814400 7200

$ dig dyn-dnssec.com +short soa @ns2.mydyndns.org
ns1.dyn-dnssec.com. hostmaster.dyn-dnssec.com. 2009061601 10800 900 1814400 7200

$ dig dyn-dnssec.com +short soa @ns3.mydyndns.org
ns1.dyn-dnssec.com. hostmaster.dyn-dnssec.com. 2009061601 10800 900 1814400 7200

$ dig dyn-dnssec.com +short soa @ns4.mydyndns.org
ns1.dyn-dnssec.com. hostmaster.dyn-dnssec.com. 2009061601 10800 900 1814400 7200

$ dig dyn-dnssec.com +short soa @ns5.mydyndns.org
ns1.dyn-dnssec.com. hostmaster.dyn-dnssec.com. 2009061601 10800 900 1814400 7200

You can also use DNSCog, our DNS diagnostic tool to test your domain to ensure it passes the variety of validation checks.