DNS Scavenging Issues

I have taken over a network that has some DNS issues. Scavenging has not been active in over two years. I know that this needs to be setup on intervals to automatically run but the issue I am having is that this doesn’t seem to do anything about the old host A files that already exist for machines that are long gone. On average each server on this network has 3 to 4 host A files attached to its ip address. I am very new to DNS so I am not quite sure how to deal with this issue? I can clean up the servers easily enough because their number is limited but i have 4000 plus clients that makes it unrealistic to try to fix the issue completely by hand.

I am sure there is a quick and dirty way to take care of this and any help would be great! I may just not be using scavenging correctly?

If you’re not sure what each of the values represents and want to understand how it fits together you might find this useful from the MS networking team:

http://blogs.technet.com/networking/archive/2008/03/19/don-t-be-afraid-of-dns-scavenging-just-be-patient.aspx

Once it’s running Scavenging can be happily ignored, it just sits in the background and gets on with it.

I also have some scripts that can be used to report on the state of records in a zone and their associated time stamps. I wrote them to help evaluate the impact of enabling Scavenging on a zone. Would they be any use to you?