DNS Search Order Question

[Paul Wain]

Seeing a weirdness in Vista networking relating to DNS search order...

Our DHCP gives out:

corp.company.com
internal.company.com
company.com
dev.company.com
test.company.com

On XP, attempting to resolve the host "xrn.stage" which has a FQHN of
"xrn.shage.company.com" works correctly and IE7 ends up in the right place

On Vista (Ultimate and Enterprise) the same setup fails with an unknown
hostname both in IE7 and via nslookup in the command prompt

Any thoughts/suggestions? We dont want stage.company.com to be a publish
domain for a number of reasons mostly related to it being an exact copy of a
production setup.

Thanks.

 

[Joe Guidera]

I assume that if you use xrn.stage.corp.company.com it resolves correctly?
Technically I think the stack in Vista is operating correctly. When you
attempt to lookup xrn.stage you are technically providing a domain. While
all hosts are domains, not all domains are hosts and that appears to be what
you're running into. I do agree that this may be different behavior than XP
or prior versions of the stack.

If your DNS servers handle the zone "stage" you'd be fine as well since
xrn.stage would resolve correctly as host "xrn" in domain "stage".

The way many companies handle this sort of thing is using different domains
(and corresponding DNS servers) internally than they do externally so they
aren't publishing internal hosts externally. So you might use company.com
externally and company.net (for example) internally.

Not sure if the RFC specifies how your situation is supposed to be handled,
but I suspect that domain completion (e.g. suffix search order) is
implementor specific.

Joe