Windows DNS scavenging issue. Gurus - I need you!

seamus

Right, we're having an awful strange issue with one particular record in DNS.

It's windows DNS obviously, running on the DC. I have one particular server, Server 2003 running on a virtual server.

Every Friday at 10.10am, the scavenging run kicks off. And every Friday around 10.10am, the record for this host gets deleted from DNS.

The server has a static IP, and has been instructed to register itself in DNS.
The no-refresh time in DNS is 8 hours, and the refresh time is 9 hours.

We've tried everything;
Created the record manually. The record was scavenged
Used the /registerdns switch to force the server to register. The record was scavenged.
Instructed the DNS server to not scavenge the record. The record was scavenged.

As best I can tell, the server is simply not bothering to attempt to register itself in DNS. The first time it happened, I wasn't around. The problem "fixed itself" after about 30 minutes. Which means that the server registered itself in DNS.
So perhaps the server does register itself in DNS, but only makes an attempt every X hours. So the time between registration attempts is so large that it goes over the 9 hour refresh limit, and the record gets scavenged. I've googled to see if it's possible to tell the server when to attempt to update its DNS record, but alas I've had no luck. It would also be useful if the server wrote an event in the event log every time it tried to refresh itself in DNS, but unfortunately it only shows failures.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Static M.e.

Have you only one DNS server?

What virtual server software are you running?

How is the NIC on the Virtual Server machine itself configured?

Created the record manually. The record was scavenged

This seems to be the crux of your problem

Have you tried Clearing the cache and then register the server.

seamus

Static M.e. wrote:

Have you only one DNS server?

No, there are three or four, but all the testing for this is done on the SOA.

What virtual server software are you running?

How is the NIC on the Virtual Server machine itself configured?

It's running on VMWare afaik, the NIC is just shared (i.e. all machines connect to the network individually).

This seems to be the crux of your problem

Have you tried Clearing the cache and then register the server.

Done this. When I created it manually, the server itself was generating errors that it didn't have permission to refresh its record. So I gave it permission. And the record got scavenged anyway.

WizZard

From here

By default, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 re-register their A and PTR resource records every 24 hours regardless of the computer's role. To change this time, add the DefaultRegistrationRefreshInterval registry key under the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\TcpIP\Services\Parameters
The interval is set in seconds.

HTH