Changes to DNS, DHCP and Scavenging: Part Deux

Over the weekend, I made a lot of changes to all of our servers. This should not affect the operation of any of our servers, or services. However, some clients that may have not released their address, and refreshed their DNS may end up experiencing delays in getting to network resources.

Helpdesk, if calls of this nature are received, please instruct the user to simply reboot their computer. This should resolve the issue.

A bit of details regarding changes that were made:

Most of the change that were made are references in the older change log post. so no need to repeat it here. In general, the main points of changes are as follows:

• All DHCP servers now have a lease time of 4 days instead of 8.
• If you see DHCP servers that are still set to 8, please make sure to change them to 4
• Right click on the DHCP Scope, and change the “Lease duration for DHCP clients” Limited to 4 days.
• Restart DHCP
• All DNS servers that were running on Windows 2000 server, are no longer active. All corresponding site DHCP servers have changed their pointers to point to 10.40.55.2, 10.40.55.10, and 10.40.55.19. With the exception of cvusd-do-dc1, which is still running DNS. (to be upgraded soon)
• Scavenging for stale records has been set to 3 days (no refresh) and 2 days (Refresh), and the deletion of scavenged and stale records will happen once every 24 hours.
• The same Scavenging settings have been applied on all the Zones, Forward and Reverse.

In order to mitigate against losing our zones due to mistakes in scavenging in the past. I have gone ahead and made backups of all the zones, with the following command:

dnscmd /ZoneExport chino.k12.ca.us chino.k12.ca.us.dns.081509.bak

I have repeated the process for every zone, including the reverse zones. These backups are stores on C:\Windows\System32\dns, on do-dc1.

Should any adverse effect be seen due to these changes, please notify me, and I will look into the issue.