Question : DNS/DHCP & AD setup

Need some help troubleshooting an issue.

2 AD sites. Each site has a DC which handles DHCP.
Ad works OK, with replication etc etc. This I think is becasue there are static DNS entries.


But I'm having some ping/resolution issues.

Say I'm on site b and I want to ping a machine on site a.
Computer goes off to the DNS server to find name. The address
of this DNS server has been doled out by DHCP.

But DNS only knows about machines on this subnet.
What should it do? Well because it's AD integrated DNS surely it will be updated
during next replication. So I could wait.

But I dont want to wait. I want to do the work now.
Fortunately my DHCP is also dolling out a secondary address for DNS.
So my computer should say, "Hey, server A doesn't know, what about server B?"

But it's not doing that. It's just coming back saying dunno that machine is, so cant ping it.
Where am I going wrnog? IS it the DNS settings on the server NICS, is it DHCP or am I just a muppet :(

So I have a few questions.

What should the DNS settings be on the nics of the DNS servers (that also hand out DNS settings for DHCP)
What DNS settings should the DHCP servers be doling out to the clients.

The way I have it now is

Site A 172.16.32.x
DNS server is 172.16.32.1 and has forwarders to the outside world.
It doles out 172.16.32.1 as pri DNS and 172.16.64.1 as sec dns
It's nic DNS settings are as above but not via DHCP

Site b 172.16.64.x
DNS server is 172.16.64.1 and has forwarders to 172.16.32.1 and the outside world
It doles out 172,16,64,1 as pri DNS and 172.16.32.1 as sec dns
It's nic setting are as above but not via DHCP

I think that site b's forwarders to site are not needed.
But sec dns is what' confusing me (I think)

Answer : DNS/DHCP & AD setup

You've made me question the DNS setup we have here too.
Our Primary Servers are different but they should be all the same. The reason is the primary server holds the records for that zone and is the authority when it comes to lookups for that zone. If you're primary server doesn't have it then none of the others will. So if each server thinks its the primary server then each will keep its own records and not look to the other servers for records it doesn't have.
If you have more than one domain in your dns you will need to specify the SOA details for each and keep them consistent across the servers.

Have a look here for more info;
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779148%28WS.10%29.aspx