Tag: dns

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Don’t Forget to Check your DNS Root Server IPs

If you are using Root Hints in your organisation for DNS lookups, you should probably check your root server IPs to ensure they are up to date… especially if your DNS servers/DCs are quite old.

The root server FQDNs and IPs are baked in to the DNS manager in Windows and although they don’t change very often (for obvious reasons) it is worth checking that the IPs are up to date; when I checked on my servers there was one entry that needed updating… not likely to cause big problems but definitely worth checking.

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Setting up Lync SRV Records with Claranet – Office 365

Office 365 is (in a nutshell) a bunch of Microsoft services and software that are (mainly) cloud based.
Some of the important features to trial in Office 365 before we conclude whether it is something we want to go ahead and adopt are the Exchange Online, Sharepoint, Lync and Office Web Apps.

Whilst attempting to trial Microsoft Lync, I came across a few problems trying to add the SRV records to our domain host, Claranet.
A SRV record has many parts to it which I thought were not adequately labelled in Claranet’s control panel. Even after following online examples (Wikipedia has a good one), I was still not able to get it working.

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Force DD-WRT to use OpenDNS Servers for DNS Queries

In one of my recent articles, I explained how I set-up a guest wireless network for our work place (after getting it to work with the right wireless channel :))

After configuring the guest access point, I set up the DNS servers to point to OpenDNS in order to provide a safer and faster DNS service (compared to the default DNS servers our ISP provides) as well as choosing what web-sites should be allowed on the network.
For example, bandwidth hogging (Media/Video Sharing) and other web-sites which could potentially be used for illicit purposes (P2P/File Sharing) are forbidden on the network.

However, without any firewall rules on the router itself, it would still be possible for a guest on the network to change their DNS settings on their wireless adapter to point to any other DNS server; effectively bypassing all OpenDNS filters on the network for that specific client.

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