DNS Server Logs Event 7062: “DNS Server Encountered a Packet Addressed to Itself” due to root hints missing

I had a client who was intermittently having problems accessing various Internet sites. 

From the small business server Windows update would not work and the antivirus software was not updating. 

The primary forwarder set in DNS was 139.130.4.4 which was not responding on a ping, and when I was pinging domain names they were not resolving.  I changed forwarder to 203.50.to.71 which is another Telstra DNS server. This seemed to fix the issue but then the same intermittent problem continued to occur.  Checking the DNS event log I found numerous messages like the following when the antivirus was trying to update indicating it was not resolving DNS still…

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: DNS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7062
Date:  31/03/2009
Time:  7:33:11 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: SERVER
Description:
The DNS server encountered a packet addressed to itself on IP address 192.168.2.1. The packet is for the DNS name “27da2f1b82b09d34b8100624bb8d1010.sig.jp1.sophosxl.com.”. The packet will be discarded. This condition usually indicates a configuration error.

Check the following areas for possible self-send configuration errors:
  1) Forwarders list. (DNS servers should not forward to themselves).
  2) Master lists of secondary zones.
  3) Notify lists of primary zones.
  4) Delegations of subzones.  Must not contain NS record for this DNS server unless subzone is also on this server.
  5) Root hints.

Example of self-delegation:
  -> This DNS server dns1.example.microsoft.com is the primary for the zone example.microsoft.com.
  -> The example.microsoft.com zone contains a delegation of bar.example.microsoft.com to dns1.example.microsoft.com,
  (bar.example.microsoft.com NS dns1.example.microsoft.com)
  -> BUT the bar.example.microsoft.com zone is NOT on this server.

Note, you should make this delegation check (with nslookup or DNS manager) both on this DNS server and on the server(s) you delegated the subzone to. It is possible that the delegation was done correctly, but that the primary DNS for the subzone, has any incorrect NS record pointing back at this server. If this incorrect NS record is cached at this server, then the self-send could result.  If found, the subzone DNS server admin should remove the offending NS record.

You can use the DNS server debug logging facility to track down the cause of this problem.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I then checked the root hints and found that the only server was the server’s own IP address. 

I.e. it was pointing to itself for root hints causing the DNS error.  I removed it out of the root hints and selected copy from server and entered the IP 198.32.64.12 which then recreated the list of root hints.

DNS root hints setting

 

Turns on small business server setups the default seems to be that root hints points to itself and so you need to know to change it on any sbs setup.