If you’ve had to work with Active Directory or Exchange, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a feature of DNS called a SRV record. SRV records are an extremely important part of Active Directory (They are, in fact, the foundation of AD) and an optional part of Exchange Autodiscover. There are a lot of other applications that use SRV records to some degree or another (Lync/Skype for Business relies heavily on them, for instance).The question, though, is why SRV records are so important and what exactly do they do?
What does a SRV record do?
The purpose of a SRV record is found in its longer, more jargon filled name: Service Locator Record. It’s basically a DNS record that is meant to allow applications to find a Server that is providing a Service the application needs to function. They provide a centralized method of configuration and control of applications that result in less work configuring the client of a client/server based application.
For example, let’s say you’re an application designer and you are creating an application that needs to talk to a server for some reason. Prior to the existence of SRV records in DNS, you had two choices:
- Program the application so it only ever talked to a server if it had a specific name or IP address
- Include some configuration settings in the application that would let end users put in the DNS name of the server.
Both of these options are not very useful for usability. Hard-coding IP addresses or host names for the server makes setup difficult and very strict in its requirements. Making end users enter the server information usually causes a lot more work for IT staff, as they would usually be required to do this for all the users.
SRV records were first added to the DNS protocol’s specifications around the year 2000 to give programmers another option for designing Client/Server based software. With SRV records, the application can be designed to look for a SRV record and get server information without having be directly configured by end users or IT staff. This is similar to the first option above, but allows greater flexibility because the server can have any name or IP address you want and the application can still find it. Some of the advanced features of SRV records also allow failover capabilities and a lot of other cool stuff.
How do SRV Records Work?
Since Active Directory relies so heavily on SRV records, let’s use it as an example to explain how they work. First, let’s take a look at a typical AD DNS zone. Below, you can see a picture that shows the fully expanded _MSDCS zone for my test lab:
This shows the _Kerberos and _ldap SRV records created by a Domain Controller (Megaserver). Here’s basically what those records are for:
- Windows Login requires a Domain-Joined client to connect to a Domain Controller
- The login system is programmed to find a Domain Controller by looking for a SRV record at _ldap.Default-First-Site-Name._sites.DC._msdcs.sysinteg.ad
- The SRV record listed above has a value that returns megaserver.sysinteg.ad as the location of the server providing the _ldap service.
- The computer’s programming fills in a blank left for whatever value the _ldap service returns with the value that is returned (megaserver.sysinteg.ad).
- The computer then talks to megaserver.sysinteg.ad exclusively for all functions that require it to use LDAP (Which is the underlying Protocol used by AD for what it does).
If SRV records didn’t exist, we would be required to manually configure every computer on the domain to use megaserver.sysinteg.ad for anything related to AD. Now, that’s certainly not an unfeasible solution, but it does give us a lot more work to do.
What Makes up a SRV record?
A SRV record has a number of settings that are required for them to function. To see all the settings, look at the image below:
That shows an Exchange Autodiscover SRV record. I’ll explain what each setting here does:
Domain: This is an un-changeable value. It shows the DNS Domain the SRV record belongs to.
Service: This is the “service” the SRV record will be used to define. In the image, that service is Autodiscover. Note that all SRV records should have an Underscore at the start, so the service value is _autodiscover. The underscore prevents issues where there might be a regular A record with the same name as a SRV record.
Protocol: This is the Protocol used by the service. This can functionally be anything, since the protocol in a SRV record is usually only meant to organize SRV records, but it’s best to use the protocols allowed by RFC 2782 to ensure compatibility (_tcp and _udp are universally accepted), but the Protocol can be anything. Unless you are designing software that uses SRV records, you’ll never be in a situation where you’ll have to make a decision about what to put as the Protocol. If you’re trying to configure a SRV record for some application that you are setting up, just follow the instructions when creating a SRV record.
Priority: In a situation where multiple servers are providing the same service, the Priority value determines which server should be contacted first. The server chosen will always be the one with the lowest number value here.
Weight: In a situation where you have multiple SRV records with the same Service value and Priority value, the Weight is used to determine which server should be used. When the application is designed according to RFC 2782, the Weight value of all SRV records is added together to determine the full Weight. Whatever portion of that weight a single SRV record is assigned determines how often a server will be used by the application. For instance, if you have 2 SRV records with the same Service and Priority where Server 1 has a weight of 50 and Server 2 has a weight of 25, Server 1 will be chosen by the application as its service provider 2/3s of the time because it’s weight of 50 is 2/3s of the total weight assigned, or 75. Server 2 will be chosen the remaining 1/3 of the time. If there’s only one server to host the service, set this value to 0 to avoid confusion.
Port Number: This setting provides Port data for the application to use when contacting the server. If, for instance, your server is providing this service on port 5000, you would put 5000 in as the Port number. The setting here is defined by how the server is configured. For Autodiscover, as shown above, the value is 443, which is the default port designated by the HTTPS protocol. The Autodiscover Website in my environment is being hosted on the default HTTPS port, so I put in port 443. If I wanted to change my server to use port 5000, I could do so, but I would need to update my SRV record to match (As an aside, if I wanted to change the port Autodiscover was published on, I would be required to use a SRV record for Autodiscover to work, as opposed to any other method).
Host Offering this Service: This is, put simply, the host name of the server we want our clients to communicate with. You can use an IP address or a Host name here, but it’s generally best to use the Host name, since IPs can and do change over time.
Using SRV Records to Enable High Availability
If you managed to read through all the descriptions of those settings up there, you may have noticed my explanation of the Priority and Weight settings. Well, those two settings allow for one of the best features of SRV records: High Availability.
Prior to the existence of SRV records, the only way you could use DNS to enable high availability was to use a feature called Round Robin. Round Robin DNS is where you have multiple IP addresses assigned to one host name (or A record). When this is set up, the DNS server will alternate between all the IPs assigned to that A record, giving the first IP out to the first client, the second IP to the second client, the third IP to the third client, and the first IP again to the fourth client (assuming 3 IPs for one A record).
With a SRV record, though, we can configure much more advanced and capable High Availability features by having multiple SRV records that have the same Service Name, but different combinations of Priority and Weight.
When we use SRV records, we have two options for high availability: Failover and Load Balancing. We can also combine the two if we wish. To do this, we manipulate the values of Priority and Weight.
If we want failover capabilities for our application, we would have two servers hosting the service and configure one server with a lower Priority value than the second. When the application performs a SRV record lookup, it will retrieve all the SRV records and attempt to contact all servers until it gets a response, using the Priority value to determine the order. A lower Priority value will be contacted first.
If we want to have load balancing for the application (all servers can be used at any time), we have multiple SRV records with the same service name, like with the Failover solution, and the same Priority value. We then determine how much of the load we want each server to take. If we have two servers providing the same service and want them to share the load equally, we pick any even number between 2 and 65534 (65535 is the highest possible Weight value) then divide that number by 2. The resulting value is entered for the Weight on both servers. When a client queries the SRV record, it will receive all values that match the SRV record, calculate the total weight, and then pick a random number between 1 and whatever the total weight value of all SRV records is to determine which server to talk to.
For instance, if you had Server 1 and Server 2 both with a Weight of 50 in their SRV record, the client would assign half of the total weight value, 100, to Server 1 and half to Server 2. Let’s say it assigns 1-50 to Server 1 and 51-100 to Server 2. The client would then pick a number between 1 and 100. If it picked a number between 1 and 50, the client would communicate with Server 1. Otherwise, it would talk to Server 2. Note: Because this functions using a random number, you will not always end up with a results that match the calculated expectations. Also note: The system used to determine which system is used, based on the Weight value, is determined by the application’s developer. This is just a simple example of how it can work. Some developers may choose a scheme that always results in an exact load distribution.
The Weight value can be used with as many servers as you want (up to 65534 servers), and with any percentage amount you want to define your load balancing scheme. You can have 4 Servers, with only three providing service 33% of the time, while the fourth server only gets chosen when all others are down by setting the weight for three SRV records to 33 and the fourth to 0. Note that a value of 0 means that the server is only chosen when all others are unavailable. You should not set multiple copies of the same SRV record with weights of 0.
Lastly, you can combine Priority and Weight to have multiple load balanced groups of servers. This isn’t a very common solution, but it is possible to have Server 1 and 2 using priority 1 and weight 50, with Server 3 and 4 using priority 2 with weight 50. In this situation, Servers 1 and 2 would provide 50 percent of the system load, but if both Server 1 and 2 stopped working, Server 3 and 4 would then be used, while distributing the load between themselves.
Tinkering with AD
If you want to see how SRV records can be used to handle high availability and get a good example of a system that uses SRV records to their fullest capabilities, try tinkering with some of your AD SRV records. By manipulating Priority and Weight, you can force clients to always use a specific DC, or configure them to use one DC more often than others.
Try modifying the Weight and Priority of the various SRV records to see what happens. For instance, if you want one specific DC in your environment to handle Kerberos authentication and another one to hand LDAP lookups, change the priorities of those records so one server has a 0 in Kerberos and 100 in LDAP, while the other has 100 in Kerberos and 0 in LDAP. You can also tinker with the Weight to give a DC with more resources priority over smaller, backup DCs. Give your monster DC a weight of 90 and a tiny, possibly older DC a weight of 10. By default, Clients in AD will pick a DC at random.
The easiest way to see this in action is to set one DC with a Priority of 10 and another with a priority of 20 on all SRV records in the _msdcs zone. Then make sure the DNS data is replicated between the DCs (either wait or do a manual replication). Run ipconfig /flushdns on a client machine and log out, then back in. Run SET LOGONSERVER in CMD to see which DC the computer is using. Now, switch the priorities of the SRV records in DNS, wait for replication, run ipconfig /flushdns, then then log out and back in again. Run SET LOGONSERVER again and you should see that the second DC is now chosen.
Final Thoughts
As I mentioned, much of a SRV record’s configuration is determined by Software Developers, since they define how their application functions. To be specific, as an IT administrator or engineer, you’ll never be able to decide what the Service Name and Protocol will be. Those are always determine by software developers. You’ll also never be in control of whether or not an application will use SRV records. Software Developers have to design their applications to make use of SRV records. But if you take some time to understand how a SRV record works, you can greatly improve functionality and security for any and all applications that support configuration using SRV records.
If you’re a Software Developer, I have to point out the incredible usefulness of SRV records and the power they give to you. Instead of having to hard-code server configurations or develop UIs that allow your end users to put in server information, you can utilize SRV records to partially automate your applications and make life easier for the IT people who make your software work. SRV records have been available for almost 2 decades now. It’s about time we started using them more and cut down the workload of the world’s IT guys.
