Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Strange Sporadic DNS Issue

Status
Not open for further replies.

bolasete

IS-IT--Management
Jan 4, 2002
17
US
We recently upgraded our office to a new active directory with the PDC being a 2003 server. This same server also does both DHCP and DNS.

All the workstations are DHCP clients though I honestly don't know if this is related. We have an internal domain of local.company.com. Our DNS server has records for all our internal servers and workstations and a smattering of internet addresses. For the most part it just forwards request to the primary DNS server of our ISP.

95% of the time everything works prefectly fine. However we have this sporadic issue which seems to occur on workstations. It could be occuring on servers I suppose but since people aren't actively browsing and such from the servers it could be it's universal and I don't see it.

Occsionally users will suddenly not be able to ping or resolve any local host names. This is the case whether they use the short name "ping server" or the full name "ping server.local.company.com"

the odd things is at the very same time these users can ping outside internet addresses. more odd is the fact that they can run an nslookup on the local machines and get an answer from our internal dns server. they can resolve the name via nslookup but nothing else - no ping , no browing , no hitting the machine through windows explorer , nothing. if i specify the exact ip address of the internal server, it can be reached which is why this seems to be dns althought the nslookup thing sure is funny.

correcting this is a bit odd as well. releasing and renewing the ip does not do the trick. howver if i open up the TCP/IP properties on the network connection go to the DNS server tab and change something, change it back and hit ok, despite the fact that the setting are the same, everything works again. I have double checked that after doing this the local ip info of the machine has not changed.

there is a slight delay when i hit ok after not changing any properties, longer than you'd think given nothing has changed. this seeems to happen on any and all workstations and is not limited to a specific set.

we use a signal subnet for our DHCP, we have a very simple set up. The range is 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.200 . Not sure what other details might help someone guess as to what is causing this. Thanks for reading this far =).
 
Check the DNS settings...

Make sure that all machines on your network point to the Windows 200x server for DNS. All machines must ONLY use Windows DNS and the clients and servers should not point to the ISP DNS server at all. (You Windows DNS server should have at least one forwarder configured to perform Internet DNS lookups)



Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please contact (Sales@njcomputernetworks.com)
 
all servers and clients only point to the internal dns server. no ones knows about the isp dns server outside of the dns server itself. i appreciate the quick response.
 
This is a pretty common problem after an upgrade and I've had it happen to me as well although more on the external side versus internal, but both can be an issue.

Install the Dnscmd.exe program from the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools.

From cmd prompt do: dnscmd /config /enablednsprobes 0
(Note that is a zero)


FRCP
 
I seem to remember reading somewhere that using "local" in a domain name can lead to issues. I would change it.

Marty
Network Admin
Hilliard Schools
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top