Name resolution

[frl]

Hi,
can anbody tell me how can I find out from where our clients resolve there name. If I ping clients by name it works, but I do not know from where do they resolve name to ip.
We have a NT 4.0 domain controller and Windows 2000 member server. DHCP is running on NT 4.0 and WINS is on Windows 2000 server (although I think it is not set up properly). We use external servers for DNS (for our corporate network).

Thanks in advance!

 

[tdenitti]

You answered your own question there. You are using external DNS to resolve names. Also you can type ipconfig/all in a command window to determine the exact IP of your DNS servers. Hope this helps.

 

[frl]

I know the IPs of our DNS servers. I want to know how are addresses of coputers on our LAN resolved from IPs. For example when I ping computers on our LAN by name. I can do that even if I delete the settings for our DNS servers (corporate) or put an IP of our local server there. Then I cannot browse the Internet by site names but I can still ping our LAN computer by their name.

 

[SuperFreak]

Hmmm, interesting. Try this:

After you delete the DNS settings, log off and log back on. Then from a command prompt, type "set". This will show you where all your settings are coming from, including the BDC you authenticate to, etc. Just curious what that would show for DNS...

...maybe the info is cached on the machine...?

 

[grimmy26]

do you have the netbeui protocol installed?

 

[Andyleates]

You might also find a

nbtstat -r

useful, as it shows how names have been resolved.

Andy Leates MCSE CCNA MCP+I

 

[rdroske]

The external DNS are obviously only resolving external names (

http://www.yahoo.com

etc).

The WINS service is probably resolving the internal names if the WINS address on the clients is set to the IP of the 2000 machine running WINS (they would normally get that address from the DHCP server).

The other possibilities are broadcasts (normally would only work if all machines were on the same subnet) and hosts/lmhosts files.

To know the order which a machine will use when trying to resolve a name you check the node type which you can see in IPConfig. Machines normally get tihis from DHCP also

Search MS for the defs of different ones. The most common
is Hybrid which if I remember correctly will try WINS if configured, then hosts/lmhosts, DNS, then broadcast or something like that.