On 2014-06-03 05:49, Carsten Strotmann wrote:
Dave Warren writes:

Obviously it's not a suitable replacement for Active Directory driven
DNS.
why not? It is best practice to separate DNS resolver (caching DNS
server like Unbound) and authoritative Server. While WinDNS can be used
in both functions, it makes a good resilient and manageable DNS design
to separate the DNS server functions on dedicated machines.

In general, I agree that it makes sense to split authoritative and resolver roles. However, in the case of Windows and Active Directory, Active Directory is built under the assumption that your DNS servers accept AD authenticated dynamic updates, both from AD itself and from clients, so it's best practice to only specify Microsoft DNS servers for Active Directory domain controllers, member servers and workstations when possible.

While you can do it via other methods (setting up AD's entries manually or forwarding the appropriate zones), it takes a lot of head-banging to get everything working and if you mess it up, the effects are subtle and intermittent since parts of Windows will fall back on broadcasts and other unreliable methods, and therefore will sometimes work even with DNS misconfigured.

Also keep in mind that Microsoft's authoritative DNS is multi-master and site-aware (so a machine registered in the current site will be immediately available in DNS to the current site, but might take time to propagate to other physical sites in the same DNS zone, balancing the need for quick updates vs keeping the number of updates between sites reasonable)

My theory is that each site (physical location as well as Active Directory site/subnet) would have one unbound server that performs internet resolution, with multiple AD servers that forward to the unbound server.


Unbound will nicely work as an secure DNSSEC validating resolver,
resolving Internet names and also (possible) local Active Directory
names that are stored on WinDNS AD integrated servers.

Microsoft DNS's DNSSEC support is limited at best, and it has no pre-fetch support at all, so I'd like to use unbound for primary DNS resolution. However, hosting Active Directory on anything but Microsoft's DNS is outside of best practices for Active Directory.



However, even here, there's an interesting performance question: Is
it worth installing unbound and forwarding Microsoft DNS to unbound, or is it 
better to let Microsoft DNS perform it's own resolution?
Forwarding is (today) probably almost always slower than direct name
resolution (and more complicated and brittle), unless you are connected
to the Internet with a slow link. I recommend to not use forwarding
unless there are very special conditions.

Unbound as a direct resolver might be faster than having WinDNS as a
direct resolver.

It might. If so, I'd like to know how much faster or slower the servers are on their own, but also how much overhead is involved if Microsoft's DNS sits in the middle to see if complying with best practices is appropriate, or if there's a technical justification to go with a more complicated setup.

I have the impression that Microsoft DNS isn't particularly speedy, but I have not actually attempted to benchmark it since Windows 2003 vs an appropriate era BIND. At the time, BIND was faster, but only slightly, but since this design effectively allowed for a shared cache, the real-world performance was significantly improved.

My guess is that having several Microsoft DNS servers forward to a single unbound server which does resolution of all non-local zones will ultimately be slightly faster than having multiple Microsoft DNS servers do the work themselves, but even if it's ultimately slightly slower, gaining the benefits of Unbound's DNSSEC validation probably make it worthwhile. But if it's a lot slower, I would definitely be open to other configurations.

--
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren


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