Hello everyone!!! Ok I have been studying Active Directory but don’t know how DNS is related to it. Let say I have A domain name contoso.com and within it, I have an OU called Sale-OU and within it I have a User-group. One of the host within the User-group want to access the internet. (I am assuming that the host is in another Vlan and the Server is also in another Vlan. the server is in the 172.16.1.0/24 subnet and the host’s IP address is being given by the server in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. So the host gateway is 192.168.1.1/24. Its IP address is 192.168.1.10/24 and the dns address is 172.16.1.23/24). So if the host want to access the internet like www.yahoo.com, how would this host go about doing so. Maybe the host talk to the default gateway and the gateway unicast that communication to the server or maybe he talk to the DNS server which is the server itself. Any help would be appreciated.

To understand complex concepts you have to break them down to simplier components then build back up in complexity. Your post is a mess of multiple concepts. OU's, vlans, ip addressing.. that really don't have anything to do with really understanding how dns works which is your question. "Maybe the host talk to the default gateway and the gateway unicast that communication to the server or maybe he talk to the DNS server which is the server itself. " A host, making a request for yahoo.com would contact its listed dns server which if properly configured would be your internal MS dns server. Since the MS dns server only knows about itself and those hosts in its lan, the dns server would then forward the request to the listed in the forwarders tab isp dns servers. Since the isp dns server knows the ip of yahoo.com it would return the answer to ms dns which in turn would reply to the host requesting the information.

oh... I get it! Basically the host would contact the local MS DNS server and it will query to find the IP address of www.yahoo.com and give it to the host and now the host know what IP address to reach yahoo.com. Thank you a lot. I get it. One other question... how is DNS related to Active Directory? Again thank for the quick response!