Hi I'd like to know how I can manually change the dns alias of a failed windows 2008 server to another hot standy windows 2008 server as part of a manual failover process which I need to document as part of our support process as cannot find anything on the MS site for Windows 2008 server Thanks M

Hi, If the failed server is identified by an A record or AAAA record: This involves changing the IP address on the A record (or AAAA record if IPV6) on one of the domain controllers (or another DNS server if appropriate) that hosts the DNS role to the IP address of the standby. If the failed server is identified by a CNAME record, then the CNAME record needs to be changed to the DNS name of the passive node. Note that it will take up to the TTL of the record for all of the clients to fail over, unless the DNS cache is cleared manually with the ipconfig /flushdns command. You can use the nslookup command to identify a CNAME record by the following output (note the aliases line): C:\>nslookup host.domain.com Server: localhost Address: 127.0.0.1 Non-authoritative answer: Name: cname_target.domain.com Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Aliases: host.domain.com If this is an A record or AAAA record (note that AAAA will have an IPV6 address) C:\>nslookup host.domain.com Server: localhost Address: 127.0.0.1 Non-authoritative answer: Name: host.domain.com Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Note that localhost will be replaced by your DNS server, but in my case I ran it on a system that hosts the DNS server role. -- Mike Burr