Windows 2000 DNS Zone Transfer Fails and Logs Event ID 6524 (329872)

SYMPTOMS

When you configure zone transfers between two DNS servers on your network, the transfer may not complete and you may find an event that is similar to the following in the Event Viewer DNS Server log: Event Type: Error
Event Source: DNS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 6524
User: N/A
Computer: DNSServer
Description: Invalid response from master DNS server at IPAddress during attempted zone transfer of zone test.microsoft.com. Check DNSServer and insure that it is authoritative for this zone. This can be done by viewing or updating the list of authoritative servers for the zone. When using the DNS console, select zone ZoneName Properties at server IPAddress and click the Name Servers tab. If needed, you can add or update this server in the list there. As an alternative solution, you could also modify settings in the Zone Transfer tab to allow transfer of the zone to this and other DNS servers. where DNSServer is the name of your DNS server, IPAddress is the IP address of your master DNS server, and ZoneName is the name of your DNS zone.

CAUSE

This issue may occur if either of the following conditions is true:

A DNS registration contains characters that are not valid, such as back slashes, dashes and spaces.
The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server is configured to register client host names with DNS.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this issue, remove any host name records that contain characters that are not valid on the DNS servers.

The following table lists all the valid characters for host name and domain name records:

Category                  Valid Characters
------------------------------------------
Numeric                   0-9
Alphabetical              a-z, A-Z
Characters                . (dot), - (hyphen)

To remove a host name record, follow these steps:

Click Start, point to Programs, then point to Administrative Tools, and then click DNS.
In the DNS administrative tool, examine the host records in each Forward and Reverse Lookup Zone.
After you have located a host record that contains a character that is not valid, right-click the host record, click Delete, and then click OK.
Repeat step 3 for each record that is not valid.

Note: If you are using DHCP to register the client host names with DNS, you may have to rename the client to prevent recreating a registration that is not valid.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

101785 Valid TCP/IP Host Names (as Specified by RFC 952)