Microsoft KB Archive/168321

= Creating a DNS Record for a Host with Two or More IP Addresses =

Article ID: 168321

Article Last Modified on 11/1/2006

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q168321



SUMMARY
You may have a computer with two or more network interface cards (NICs), or one NIC with more than one IP address, and need to add a record for the additional IP address(es) to your Domain Name Service (DNS) server. This article explains how to add this entry.



MORE INFORMATION
An "A" record needs to be created for each IP address that the host uses.

For example, you have a server whose DNS host name is and DNS domain name is . This server has 2 IP addresses assigned to it: IPAddress1 and IPAddress2 (replace IPAddress1 and IPAddress2 with server's IP addresses).

To add these IP addresses, create 2 A records in the  zone:

  Myserver   A    Myserver  A   

NOTE: The Microsoft DNS Server supports round robin, which is a technique used as a form of load balancing between servers (to get more information about this feature, refer to RFC 1794). This feature will make DNS send both IP addresses when a query is received for myserver.mydomain.com. The client (or Resolver) will always use the first one. The next time DNS receives a query for this name the order of the list of IP addresses is changed in a round robin fashion (the address that was first in the previous list will be last in the new list). Round Robin of Cname records is not supported because there should be only one canonical name for any one alias.

If, for some reason, you need the Resolver to get the same IP address every time, create two more "A" records assigning a unique name to each address. For example, you can create:

  Altname1   A    Altname2  A   

Using this method, a Resolver will always obtain IPAddress1 when sending a query for Altname1 and will always obtain IPAddress2 when sending a query for Altname2.

NOTE: A "CNAME" record is not used, since DNS will look up the IP address of , returning the 2 IP addresses.

See RFC 2181 for more information.

Additional query words: DNS multi-homed multiple IP Addresses Multihomed multi homed

Keywords: kbnetwork KB168321

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