DNS not forwarding properly?

[Guest]

No AD yet, Running a mixed enviroment of all different types of clients.
Trying to get rid of Novell and get dns working smoothly.

When I ping a hostname of a PC that is in another dns suffix, my DNS will
not resolve. If I put in the full FQDN of hostname.dns.suffix.com I can get
a resolution of IP and ping the machine all day long.

Forwards have been setup and seem to be working and updating the seperate
zones.

I thought that if a hostname wasn't found, DNS would parse each zone file to
find look for the matching hostname. Do I not have something set right?

Thanks in Advance

 

[Kevin D. Goodknecht Sr. [MVP]]

In

No AD yet, Running a mixed enviroment of all different
types of clients. Trying to get rid of Novell and get dns
working smoothly.

When I ping a hostname of a PC that is in another dns
suffix, my DNS will not resolve. If I put in the full
FQDN of hostname.dns.suffix.com I can get a resolution of
IP and ping the machine all day long.

Forwards have been setup and seem to be working and
updating the seperate zones.

I thought that if a hostname wasn't found, DNS would
parse each zone file to find look for the matching
hostname. Do I not have something set right?

It will if the domain's DNS suffix is in the DNS suffix search list.
When you run your ipconfig /all is the domain in the DNS suffix search list?

 

[Herb Martin]

No AD yet, Running a mixed environment of all different types of clients.
Trying to get rid of Novell and get dns working smoothly.

When I ping a hostname of a PC that is in another dns suffix, my DNS will
not resolve. If I put in the full FQDN of hostname.dns.suffix.com I can get
a resolution of IP and ping the machine all day long.

Forwards have been setup and seem to be working and updating the separate
zones.

I thought that if a hostname wasn't found, DNS would parse each zone file to
find look for the matching hostname. Do I not have something set right?

No, you are confusing SERVER side with CLIENT side
behavior.

On the CLIENT side any search that does not include a
Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN*) will be tried
against the name with the client's own domain name
appended, possibly it's parent names and anything else
added explicitly to the search list appended also.

Only DNS servers have zone files.

On the SERVER, the name is checked explicitly to resolve
that the client requests (possibly with wildcards WITHING
a particular zone.)

Also, not this behavior for the client is dependent on the
built-in resolver and some programs (e.g., NSLookup) may
offer their own private resolver functionality.

*FQDN: Contrary to popular misconception, names such as

www.Microsof.com

....is NOT an FQDN. An FQDN is one terminated by a ".",
e.g.:

www.Microsoft.com.

Even, com. is an FQDN.

The terminating "." plays much the same role that an initial
"\" plays in DOS path names -- it anchors the name to the
root of the namespace.