DNS Forward Lookups Not Working

Question

My DNS experience and knowledge is pretty limited. Having said that it appears that our xserves can do reverse lookups for both of our xserves, but can't do a forward lookup. How can I fix this?
Here are the lookup information from network utility:
Lookup has started ... dataxserve.w.k12.ia.us
; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> dataxserve.w.k12.ia.us
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 37918
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;dataxserve.w.k12.ia.us. IN A
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.3#53(192.168.0.3)
;; WHEN: Tue Jan 15 13:26:53 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 49
Lookup has started ... 192.168.0.3
; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> -x 192.168.0.3
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 19034
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;3.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR
;; ANSWER SECTION:
3.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR dataxserve.w.k12.ia.us.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS dataxserve.w.k12.ia.us.
0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS xserve.w.k12.ia.us.
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.3#53(192.168.0.3)
;; WHEN: Tue Jan 15 13:32:01 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 122
Lookup has started ...xserve.w.k12.ia.us
; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> xserve.w.k12.ia.us
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 10240
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xserve.w.k12.ia.us. IN A
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.3#53(192.168.0.3)
;; WHEN: Tue Jan 15 13:32:52 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 45
Lookup has started ...192.168.0.2
; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> -x 192.168.0.2
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 49722
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;2.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR
;; ANSWER SECTION:
2.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN PTR xserve.w.k12.ia.us.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS xserve.w.k12.ia.us.
0.168.192.in-addr.arpa. 86400 IN NS dataxserve.w.k12.ia.us.
;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.0.3#53(192.168.0.3)
;; WHEN: Tue Jan 15 13:33:26 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 122
Please help

Answer 1

Hi
You don't have to if you don't want to. You can leave both servers running internal DNS Services. The DHCP Service does not require DNS. It all depends on how you want to push out network services to your clients.
I don't know your particular circumstances but its not absolutely necessary to run DNS on your mail server. It depends a great deal on how you want the server to handle mail for your domain. I'm not an expert but the way I generally do a mail server is to use external MX Records and duplicate the external record internally. Its a fairly simple method and should send and receive mail for your clients internally as well as externally.
You could configure internal DNS Services on one server only and just add a machine record for the second server. You could expand on this and configure DNS Services on both servers with a machine record for each server on both. There is enough in the GUI to allow you to do this. For example server01.mydomain.com with an IP address of 192.168.254.254 and server02.mydomain.com with an IP address of 192.168.254.253. This way if one server was to go down the other server should still provide a DNS Service to your local clients. However without knowing fully your network environment and your requirements its difficult to advise.
However is this a new setup and are you trying to get it to work? Or has it been working OK for a while and something has broken it? If its the latter what errors are you seeing?
If you want to know more about DNS purchase a copy of Paul Ablitz and Cricket Lui's book 'DNS & Bind' and start reading.
Hope this helps, Tony