Topic: DNS oddity

[andy]

I'm having some problems with accessing only a few, specific, websites through my e-smith box. Current setup is 5.1.2 connected to W2K and Win98 clients and a cable modem. Until yesterday, access to this group of sites was fine. This morning I can access every site on the web, EXCEPT this group of sites. I can't ping them from any client - I get the message that the hostname was unresolvable.If I go to anonymizer though, the site loads fine.

So, I went to the SME box, and looked up the nameservers it calls. Fine - no probs. I then managed a telnet connection to one of the rogue sites, and got the expected homepage delivered to the SME box. Yet any request to go to the same page on the clients is unresolvable. So on the Win2K client, I changed the DNS servers to match those being used by the server, and hey presto the web works. It's just that I can't use the normal internal names to get to my server-manager page anymore.....

Anyone even know where I should try to start looking to fix this prob? Newbie here, so please go easy on me . I tried searching the forums, but got nothing that seemed to resemble what I'm experiencing.

Cheers

Andy

[andy]

Forgot to mention - all URLs that are giving problems (there may be others, but these are the only ones I have come across) are ones maintained by the same company. 3 main sites, large number of sub-domains all inaccessible.

[Kelvin]

Hi Andy,

Check out :-
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=15913.msg61407#msg61407

Kelvin

[andy]

Thanks Kelvin, I plumped to upgrade the server - now running 5.5 (5.6 .iso didn't work first time round & had a spare 5.5 disk to hand) but the problem still persists, which the article you pointed me to suggests would no longer be the case. Also, the article suggested that the server was unable to resolve the hostnames - is this the case for me? I though that because the server could reach the sites, it was capable of resolving them? I can connect to all the rogue sites directly from the server command line, only clients fail to resolve them.

Any further ideas would be great - I'm really at a loss to find a way to get this to work again, and the sites I need to get to are work-related.

Thanks again for your help.

Andy

[andy]

Allow me to correct myself - neither the SME box or the clients now see the mystery sites. Time to look further up the chain methinks. At least upgrading the SME box to 5.5 got it to behave the same as the clients )