Chapter 27. Manipulating DNS

DNS is a core technology of Active Directory that cannot be overlooked. While features such as Active Directory Integrated DNS can take a lot of the hassle of managing DNS servers and zones out of your hands, you still have to set up the initial zone configurations. Unfortunately, lack of a good DNS API has always been a big gap for managing a Microsoft DNS server environment. The only way to automate maintenance and management of Microsoft DNS has been by executing Dnscmd commands from within a batch, VBScript, or Perl script. Over time, Microsoft has continued to improve Dnscmd, and as of Windows 2000, it provides just about every option you need to manage DNS server configuration, zones, and resource records using a command line. In Windows Server 2003, it even allows you to manage Application Partitions! Microsoft also provides the DNS MMC snap-in for those that want to manage DNS via a GUI, although it is not very suitable for managing large environments.

Microsoft's answer to the DNS API issue is WMI. As explained in Chapter 26, WMI is Microsoft's API of choice for managing and monitoring systems and services. With the WMI DNS provider, you have complete programmatic control over a Microsoft DNS environment, much as you do with Dnscmd from a command line.

In this chapter, we will cover the WMI DNS provider at length, including the properties and methods available for the primary WMI DNS classes. Several sample scripts will be shown, which will give you a head start on developing scripts to manage your own DNS environment.