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uSlackr
Asked: 2011-05-10 12:33:18 +0800 CST

Windows DNS - Zone Never Loaded

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In this thread today I got clarification on the meaning of the various DNS actions. Very helpful. Now to the real question. We have a Windows DNS secondary zone that maintains a copy of our parent company's DNS. When I open the zone in DNS mmc, "all" the entries show up yet the Status for the zone is listed as "zone never loaded".

This seems odd since we can apparently resolve the hosts we need to access in this dns. What is this status trying to tell us about this zone?

windows domain-name-system

4 Answers

  1. By default, AD Integrated zones do not have zone transfers allowed. Regarding transfer status, are both TCP 53 and UDP 53 allowed between the two?

    Ace Fekay

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  2. As I understand it with Windows DNS, zone transfers are not enabled by default. You have to enable them explicitly in the 'zone transfer' section in the properties of the primary zone.

    Can you confirm if you have enabled this?

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  3. Best Answer

    You're right that there is a conflicting message. A warning, plus valid data. Some things to try:

    • try adding another record to the primary and see if the secondary picks it up
    • check event viewer on your secondary to see if it offers any clues
    • are you sure all record types copied? If zone updates aren't allowed (very common nowadays) then maybe it just guessed at the basic A and MX records but wasn't able to get everything.

    Use NS lookup to confirm that your zone is responding correctly. Here's a video walkthrough on how to do that. Make sure to use server secondary_dns_server to test directly from your secondary server.

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  4. We experienced the same problem on our secondary server, when the primary AD was restored from a backup.

    In fact the serial number value on the secondary server was ahead of the serial number on the primary server. On the secondary server, the zones showed the status zone never loaded.

    I solved the problem by deleting and re-creating the lookup zones.

    The primary was a 2003, the secondary a 2012R2.

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