Using Dnscmd.exe in Windows 2000 Server

by Jim Boyce | May 21, 2007 7:00:00 AM

Tags: Servers, Domain names, Jim Boyce, Dnscmd.exe, Microsoft Windows 2000, server, line tool, Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft Windows, Windows 2000 Server Tips Newsletter

Takeaway: Dnscmd.exe is a command line tool that can help you be more efficient when it comes to repetitive tasks in Windows 2000 Server. Learn about this tool and how you can use it to discover information about your DNS server, maintain zones, and more.

A graphical user interface (GUI) can be great for novice users, but it can be quite cumbersome if you have to perform the same task over and over again. The beauty of command line tools is that you can easily script them. Sometimes command line tools can even do things GUI tools can't.

One neat command line tool is Dnscmd.exe, which can be used to perform various actions on Domain Name System (DNS) servers. Dnscmd.exe is one of the support tools from Support.cab, which is located in the support\tools directory on the Windows 2000 CD.

You can use Dnscmd.exe for a variety of tasks, which include:

• Get DNS server info.
• Initiate server scavenging.
• Enumerate and view zone info.
• Create, delete, pause, and resume zones.
• Change zone type (standard primary, standard secondary, AD integrated).
• Add, delete, and enumerate records in the zone.

If, for example, you want to create a new standard primary zone called myzone.example.com on a server called server1.example.com and stored in myzone.dns files, you would type:

dnscmd server1.example.com /ZoneAdd myzone.example.com /Primary
 /file myzone.dns

Syntax for adding DNS A records is very similar:

Dnscmdserver_name /RecordAddzone_namecomputer_name A IP_address

To add an A record for a computer named computer1 with an IP address of 169.254.0.100 in the example.com zone on myzone.example.com server, you would type:

Dnscmd myzone.example.com /RecordAdd example.com computer1 A 169.254.0.100

To manually force zone replication, type:

Dnscmdserver_name
/ZoneRefreshzone_name

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