I have a client that has two domains: company.com (their internal network) and company-prod.com (their production network).
Some of their web services were having connectivity issues on their production domain. They access their via the address www.company.com (although it is in the company-prod.com domain) and it was failing to find the service because the DNS records were unavailable for that domain.
To solve this I see two possible solutions: 1) create zone on company-prod.com for "company.com" and setup host records for hosts that are needed (ie. www) or 2) configure forwarders on company-prod.com to point to the NS for company.com
The problem I see with option 2 is if company.com is unavailable then company-prod.com would be unable to resolve names for that domain. However, I believe the names should be cached, correct? So that would only occur when a cache has expired and the company.com NS are unavailable. Any suggestions or advice on these options? Maybe there is a better way to do this? I don't spend a lot of time in DNS so, please excuse.
Best Answer
Why would company.com be unavailable? If due to some type of service/infrastructure outage then being able to resolve DNS for that domain really doesn't do any good... if the resources that DNS would resolve to can't be reached.
My suggestion would be to use option 2. It's going to be more reliable (in terms of getting proper DNS resolution) and is going to be less wotk on your part.
If you go with option 1 then you've essentially got a stale, static copy of the DNS zone and it's corresponding records, which will need to be manually created and updated.
I say defer to the authorative name servers for the domain in question.
Another option would be to use DNS stub zones.