We are currently swapping our DNS servers out, going from an older IP range to a newer one. The network side has been setup and working fine for a couple of years, there are just a few servers still in the old range that are needing moved over.
We currently have 2 domain controllers, Windows 2008 R2. I have created two new servers to replace them, Windows 2012 R2. Added the DNS role, promoted them to DCs and DNS seems to be working fine throughout. I have changed the DNS settings on about 50 other servers and all work fine, replication works for the name servers, etc. Once DNS is changed on all devices I plan to move FSMO role over and demote the old servers.
We have 2 print servers, 2008 R2 as well. They are not setup as failover/clustered, just a primary print server with a CNAME called "PrintServer" pointing to PrintServer-01. All of the printers are setup via \PrintServer\. The previous admin set this up with the intent of having a backup server in case it was needed, where you only had to change the DNS entry of PrintServer to point to the secondary server should you need to.
The problem is, I can change the DNS settings on the NIC, it accepts them and nslookup verifies it is referencing the new DNS servers. I can ping by name the PrintServer alias, and printing works from any PC I test. Approximately 2 days later, printing stops working. When we try to print, the PCs see the printer as offline. This happened last week the first time, I didn't see any reason why it was having an issue, no errors in eventvwr, etc. I ended up changing the settings back and rebooted, then everything started working.
I tried it again this week and was monitoring it more closely, same thing happened. Changed DNS settings, worked fine for about 2 days, then stopped working.
I have went through the Print Management role but see nothing related to DNS that needs changed, and nothing in the registry. Any thoughts on what might be causing this disconnect?
Thank you all for your input!
