I have an AD integrated forward DNS zone say domain.com. when I try to query a specific record in the zone like ie.domain.com it gives me answer that it's CNAME pointing to www.domain.com.
When I open the DNS Management console, I don't see this record at all.
I cleared the server cache. I created A record with same name and it let me create, but it still continued to resolve to earlier CNAME. I created CNAME record with same name and it let me create, but it still continued to resolve to earlier CNAME.
I also looked at querying the record using dnscmd.exe /enumrecords command I also looked at backend AD location (ForestDNSZone) and there also there is no such record. I also verified there are no conditional forwarder for this domain on the server.
I am stumped right now, from where DNS server is getting that CNAME record?
It turned out that subdomain was independently hosted with different AD replication scope and no delegation done in parent domain.
I knew that where zone is hosted (domain, DOmainDNSZone or ForestDNSZones) mattered in terms of where server looks up for data and looking at other partitions gave me the clue.