this particular event happened in the latter half of 2012…i just wanted to notate it for future reference.

a primary DNS server experienced an unrecoverable system failure and was completely down. i wasn’t exactly happy with the situation, but i was not exactly worried either because there was a secondary server running just fine. these servers were hosting traditional primary/secondary zones not AD-integrated zones. since there was a secondary server i didn’t feel an emergency rush to rebuild the failed server. then a day or so later (wish i knew the exact timeline) DNS wasn’t functioning at all. i logged in to check the secondary server and found that all the DNS zones were expired because too much time had gone by since the server was able to contact the primary server.

the quickest solution i could think of was to turn the secondary zones into primary zones and that resolved the problem pretty quickly. i’m not sure if the zone expiration setting is configurable or not. i was focused on getting DNS back up at the time and never researched it further. anyways, something to keep in mind.

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