Master Zone May Not Work with BIND DNS for Windows 2000 Active Directory (241973)

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256986 Description of the Microsoft Windows Registry

SYMPTOMS

When you are using BIND (a popular Domain Name System, or DNS, server implementation) DNS for a Windows 2000 Active Directory domain, the master zone may stop working with the following error message:

Master zone for "domain.com" (IN) rejected due to errors.

CAUSE

A Windows 2000 domain controller registers a host record for various locator services that do not conform to Request for Comments (RFC) 1123 restrictions on host names. For example, a host record is registered for the global catalog servers that takes the following form:

gc._mcdcs.domain.com

By default, a BIND server checks resource records to ensure that labels conform to RFC 1123 (which does not allow for the underscore character ("_") in host labels) and does not load the master zone. Microsoft complies to RFC 2181 which supersedes RFC 1123 and does not place any restrictions on characters used in a host label.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, disable name checking on the BIND DNS server. To disable name checking, add the following lines to the "/etc/named.conf" configuration file:

options {
check-names master ignore;
};

MORE INFORMATION

RFC 2181, which supercedes RFC 1123, allows for any binary string to be used for any resource record label.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

241980 Naming Syntax for the Domain Name System (DNS)

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