Browsing intranet

[jareep]

I have an issue with Internet Explorer 6 w/ SP1 running on Windows 2k
SP4. When browsing 2 particular intranet sites from a handful of
machines (5-10) in a large corporate environment (75000+ workstations)
are having DNS issues. The machines can ping the servers using FQDN
names or just the machine names themselves so resolving the address
isn't an issue. The pages only seem to have one thing in common - They
are both ASP. Its not an ASP coding problem, since only a handful of
clients are experiencing trouble. I've tried the following (results
listed beside each troubleshooting task)

1 - Recreated local user profile, by deleting the original
RESULT: Corrected one user. All others remain broken.
2 - Reset Internet Explorer to defaults
RESULT: Remain broken
3 - Logged in with an administrative user ID (normal users are power
users only)
RESULT: Remain broken for this new admin user (I had never logged in
before)
4 - Modified LMHOSTS to aide in resolving the IP address (even though I
know its having no trouble resolving the problem)
RESULT: Remain broken
5 - Hard coded in DNS suffix search orders (even though I know its not
a resolution problem)
RESULT: Remain broken
6 - Used FQDN for the URL
RESULT: Remain broken
7 - Used IP address for the URL
RESULT: Prompted for network credentials and the page loaded
normally

Obviously, having users use IP Addresses and then manually entering in
credentials isn't a valid solution. It seems that the issue could
possibly be related to passing LAN credentials, even though all our
browsers are configured the same (using an auto-configuration URL).
Any ideas on things to try in an attempt to resolve the issue?

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

....

4 - Modified LMHOSTS to aide in resolving the IP address (even though I
know its having no trouble resolving the problem)

It's HOSTS, not LMHOSTS, you want to put your DNS overrides into.

7 - Used IP address for the URL
RESULT: Prompted for network credentials and the page loaded
normally

What does nslookup show for this case?
Use its set debug command to see all the differences.

E.g. one possibility would be that there is more than one DNS server
and one of them isn't doing the lookup properly.

The machines can ping the servers using FQDN names
or just the machine names themselves so resolving the address
isn't an issue.

What happens if you try to use ping -n 1 to cache the lookups first?
Does IE find them then? (Oops. That assumes that dnscache service
is working. Is it?)

Also can you find the page with telnet 80 (plus a GET / etc.)
or a different browser? Telnet 80 (or, even better, tracing)
could show you what the first response is in case there is anything
different there.

If it is just a case of not converting a 401 response into a prompt
you could try the resolutions suggested in this article (but if they help
I would have no explanation for how doing a lookup could be interfering):

<title>KB813444 - How to troubleshoot situations where you cannot
complete MSN sign-up or connect to SSL secured (128-Bit) Web sites
by using Internet Explorer in Windows XP</title>

(Though the article was written for XP users I think all the steps
are applicable to your OS too.)


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
---

 

[jareep]

I'll try this on Monday and post an update. Thanks for the suggestions!