how to resolve DNS issues

If you're getting a lot of DNS problems discovered by Spiceworks, fixing them can be difficult, but here's a bit of a guide to help you out.

Enable/run DNS scavenging to repair DNS records

This is the easiest way to go about resolving your DNS issues. It's a good idea to just turn this on and let it always be going, but you can also force it to run to try to correct any errors that Spiceworks has picked up. It can take a while to run though. Here's some more information from TechNet. After scavenging has run, either rescan your whole network in Spiceworks, or just the devices with DNS issues. If you continue to have errors, you should check the errors yourself following the directions below.

Find & repair the DNS issues yourself

Enable reverse lookup zones on your DNS server: Reverse lookup will help make sure that the name your device is saying it's using is the same as the name that DNS is picking up for it. To enable reverse lookup zones on a typical network:

• From your DNS server (typically this is also your Active Directory domain controller), open the control panel, double-click Administrative Tools and then double-click DNS.
• Click the server name, then right-click the Reverse Lookup Zones folder and click New Zone. Now you can follow the zone configuration wizard to complete the process.
• If your network is not standard, or you are having difficulty enabling reverse zones, visit this TechNet article for a much deeper discussion.

Check for duplicate records: Now, you'll basically want to check the properties for each record and then compare them to the matching A records in the forward zone. If you find duplicate records here, you'll need to delete the incorrect ones. There are 2 ways you can go about doing this:
 1. Using the command prompt: Open a command prompt on your DNS server, and do the following:

• Choose a device on your network that is having issues resolving.
• Type nslookup <hostname>. This should return the IP address of the device.
• Now type nslookup <IP address>. This should return the hostname of the device.
• If these do not match, look for and clean up the duplicate records on your DNS server.
  
  

 2. Comparing records on your DNS server: On your DNS server, open up the reverse lookup zone and compare it with the A records in the forward zone. When there are entries that don't match, you'll need to delete the duplicates.

Test to see if changes worked

Open Spiceworks, navigate in your inventory to the device(s) you have made changes to, and click the Rescan link from the Tools drop-down menu. Alternatively, you could just rescan your whole network.