MS Reverse Lookup

If you already created your zone but you didn't create the reverse lookup first, and now you realised you "oopsed", this page is for you.

The Schpiel about the naming of that zone:

So if you're going to do reverse lookup, you must know the name of the zone. The way to do this is to evaluate your IP subnet. I have seen some name it 1-127.2.31.172.in-addr.arpa, and that will NOT work. You must name it according to the closest class C your network falls into, or class B, if applicable, then drop the octet(s) that would be 0 if you were to just write down your network address. (with MS DNS you can use the 0's also if you want, this is just not standard) I know this is confusing. Check this out:
192.168.100.0 = 100.168.192.in-addr.arpa
152.12.0.0      = 12.152.in-addr.arpa
10.0.0.0          = 10.in-addr.arpa

Once you have your zone name figured out,  go into MS DNS administrator and create the new zone. Name the file as necessary (I always give it a txt extension) and finish the dialogs out. Once you have created your zone, you can now add the PTR (pointer) records for all of your hosts.

Choose New Record from the DNS menu. Choose the type of "PTR". You now get to add the reverse-lookup records for all of your hosts. It would be nice if you could just perform record maintenance on the host, such as double-clicking the record in the zone and leaving the "Update associated PTR record" checkbox checked and click OK, but MS DNS isn't that smart.

Remember, the IP address is only good for one name, the first name that the DNS server reads will be returned, so, if your DNS server had 2 ptr records for 172.21.2.2, and the first one is mail.mydomain.com, that;'s what will be returned to the querying client.

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