This is the first in a series of Lightning Posts, short snippets that I don’t really have the time to write up into a full post, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

Lightning Post 1: How to export DNS data from Microsoft DNS to a zone file.

“Why’d you wanna do that?”, I hear you cry.

Well, It’s entirely possible to use BIND (or PowerDNS, for that matter) as a DNS server instead of the integrated MS DNS service that’s bundled with Windows Server.

When you create an Active Directory, a process creates some service records, like _ldap._tcp.ForestDnsZones.yourdomain.tld and so on.

Well, these aren’t impossible to create by hand, but it’s nice to have a dump for these things at least initially.

So:

Login as Administrator, and load up a Powershell console:

dnscmd YourDomainController.tld /ZoneExport YourDomain.fqdn.tld YourDmain.fqdn.tld.txt

Then you can look in %windir%/system32/dns/* and find the txt files containing your zone data.

Done.