Hello, PowerShell enthusiast today we will understand the interesting concept of DNS Zone and how to manage them using PowerShell. If you are already working in Windows server-related environment then you should be aware of the terms Primary, Secondary, and Stub zone in DNS. Let’s start our exciting journey for today and dwell on DNS.
What are Primary, Secondary, and Stub Zone in DNS?
Primary Zone:
As the name suggests it is a primary and important zone with a read-write portion of the DNS Namespace. Whenever a server has a DNS role has a primary zone hosted in that case the server then the server is an Authoritative server. In general, the DNS server created first in an environment will be an Authoritative DNS server.
Secondary Zone:
When it comes to Secondary Zone it can be termed as a copy-paste zone but only have read-only capabilities not write capabilities.
It is a friend of the Primary DNS zone who helps each other i.e. it shares the load on the Primary DNS zone with preventing a single point of failure.
Stub Zone:
Let me put it forward this way, there is a company X that hired a company Y, now they need to get merged but the domain Y.com won’t change but what you can do is you will be able to ping Y.com from X.com because of Stub zone. A stub zone is used to resolve the name between 2 different DNS namespaces.
Also, it contains a copy of the required resource records that is necessary to identify the authoritative DNS server.
Managing DNS Primary zone with PowerShell
#1 Creating Primary Zone
ZONE_NAME – Provide the Zone Name which needs to be created
SCOPE – Replace scope with the following value: Forest, Domain, Legacy, or Custom
UPDATE_TYPE – Replace scope with the following value: None, Secure, or NonesecureAndSecure
Add-DnsServerPrimaryZone -Name "Zone_Name" -ReplicationScope "Scope" -DynamicUpdate "update_type" –PassThru
#2 Removing Primary Zone
The below command is self-explanatory as it will remove the primary zone which is present in your domain.
Remove-DnsServerZone -Name "Zone_Name" -ComputerName "DNS_server_Name"
Find more DNS related PowerShell scripts from here, DNS Scripts
Managing DNS Secondary zone with PowerShell
#1 Creating Secondary Zone
ZONE_NAME – Provide the name of the actual zone
ZONE_FILENAME – Replace with the same zone name, just append “.dns” at the end
MASTER_IP – Provide Master IP Address (Primary DNS server)
Add-DnsServerSecondaryZone -Name "Zone_Name" -ZoneFile "Zone_FileName" -MasterServers "Master_IP"
#Removing Secondary Zone
Remove-DnsServerZone -Name "Zone_Name" -ComputerName "DNS_server_Name"
Managing Stub Zone with Powershell
#1 Creating a Sub Zone
ZONE_NAME – Provide the name of the actual zone
MASTER_IP – Provide Master IP Address
SCOPE – values depending on the replication scope that you want to set: “Forest”, “Domain”, “Legacy”, or “Custom”
Add-"DnsServerStubZone -Name ZONE_NAME" -MasterServers "MASTER_IP" -ReplicationScope "SCOPE"
#Removing Stub Zone
Remove-DnsServerZone -Name "Zone_Name" -ComputerName "DNS_server_Name"
Conclusion
I hope you have liked the post How to easily manage DNS Zone using PowerShell? and will implement this whenever it is required. Things you should always remember is to try with one zone so that it will be easy for you to make changes. Let me know if you want a blog post on some other script that might amaze you.
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