As a part of our plan to keep our network hardware reasonably up to date, we need to move the DNS service running on a Windows 2000 box to a new system. I know how to set one up from scratch but I haven’t had to migrate one before. I haven’t been able to find anything to point me in the right direction for getting this done. Suggestions?
As a part of our plan to keep our network hardware reasonably up to date, we need to move the DNS service running on a Windows 2000 box to a new system. This system handles the DNS requests coming from the Internet, so this server isn’t a part of any domain and blocks all ports except for DNS. It resides outside our firewall and functions as the primary DNS server for the domains we handle. I know how to set one up from scratch but I haven’t had to migrate one before. I haven’t been able to find anything on TechNet to point me in the right direction for getting this done. My boss has insisted keeping the machine name the same right down to the machine name you enter when installing W2K. Suggestions?
– Via the Internet
Since you have set up DNS before on W2K for use in handling outside inquiries for resolving host names on your network, you are halfway there. Making this move isn’t as hard as you might think. The first thing to do is get the new system set up and get all the patches applied. Make sure that you run the latest Baseline Security Analyzer (BSA), as this will dislpay patches and registry changes that need to be applied, ones that don’t show on the Windows Update. Turn on IP filtering; allow DNS to come through and block all other requests.
Bring up the server inside your firewall and give it a fixed internal IP address. Install the DNS service. You can now begin the process of adding the domain names handled by your current DNS server. These domains will be added as secondary DNS domains. Once all domains have been set up in this way, right click on each domain name and change it to a Primary DNS zone instead of the secondary. Once you have completed this step, change the IP address of the server to the one it will be replacing, and shut the system down.
Power down your existing primary DNS server. Take a moment to clear the arp tables in your firewall and router. This will speed up the process of getting the new DNS server online. Plug in the new DNS server and turn it on. Verify you can resolve DNS inquiries against it and you should be good to go. I would strongly suggest getting the DNS book from O’Reilly Books that deal specifically with setting up DNS on W2K for external use. Implement as many of the suggestions as you can to lock down the server as much as can be done.
