Best practice DNS in multi-forest environment

active-directorydomain-name-system

I have a multiforest environment, both forests exist in the same network. I want DNS between them to operate as smoothly as possible. Forward lookups are easy and can be handled with conditional forwarders, but what about Reverse Lookup Zones? Is there a pattern for this type of setup? Should I just have independent lookup zones for each forest and just have duplicates, everything I've read says never to do that.

Best Answer

Reverse DNS for private IP space that is company unique should live on DNS servers that are likewise reachable by all internally facing production DNS servers, to maximize unique ownership. Given the security policies that should be in place for your AD infra, it's unlikely that this central authority will be your AD servers without adequate planning and replication.

This isn't to say your AD servers should have no reverse authority. Just limit it to what is actually necessary (very little is, like joe said in the comments) and use forwarders for the rest to ensure that automatic creation of reverse records doesn't get out of hand.

(Disclaimer: I'm well aware that these are idealistic recommendations that are frequently ignored by most large companies. Those companies also have to deal with different PTR records being returned depending on which DNS servers are being used, with very few of those PTR records ever being properly cleaned up after IPs are reclaimed. In short, it's a madhouse and it always will be unless you plan to make it otherwise.)