Guaranteed to stump the pros!!!

[Guest]

Hi everyone, this is the weirdest problem ever! At work I'm using a Window XP
machine, everything works fine and dandy. But sometimes I can't access our
website, email or ftp site. This would obviously lead you to beleive its a
network issue...but..our website, email and ftp site are hosted off-site. I
can get to all other stuff on the internet, but anything to do with our site
doesn't work. This doesn't happen very often, so its not really a big
problem, I usually just reboot and it works again. But I just thought I would
post this to see what people have to say about it.

 

[Ray Costanzo [MVP]]

Many admins make (what I feel is) the mistake of naming their AD domains the
same as the company's Internet domain, i.e. example.com. So, in doing so,
that means that you cannot access your company's Web site by going to
http://example.com, because that will resolve to a DC on your network,
whereas for everyone else in the world, it'll go to your site (typically).
So, since all .example.com hosts are handled by your internal DNS, when you
go to www.example.com, your able to hit the Web site because there is a host
defined in your internal DNS server saying that www = [ip of your site].
The same holds true for ftp.example.com, mail.example.com, etc. So, I'd
imagine the issue lies somewhere within your company's DNS server(s).

I'm not sure if I explained that real well.

 

[Guest]

Wow, you know I did think that my thread subject was a little presumptuous
but then I figured it would at least motivate smart people to reply. Thanks
man.

Many admins make (what I feel is) the mistake of naming their AD domains the
same as the company's Internet domain, i.e. example.com. So, in doing so,
that means that you cannot access your company's Web site by going to
http://example.com, because that will resolve to a DC on your network,
whereas for everyone else in the world, it'll go to your site (typically).
So, since all .example.com hosts are handled by your internal DNS, when you
go to www.example.com, your able to hit the Web site because there is a host
defined in your internal DNS server saying that www = [ip of your site].
The same holds true for ftp.example.com, mail.example.com, etc. So, I'd
imagine the issue lies somewhere within your company's DNS server(s).

I'm not sure if I explained that real well.

--

Ray at work
Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET MVP

Hi everyone, this is the weirdest problem ever! At work I'm using a Window XP
machine, everything works fine and dandy. But sometimes I can't access our
website, email or ftp site. This would obviously lead you to beleive its a
network issue...but..our website, email and ftp site are hosted off-site. I
can get to all other stuff on the internet, but anything to do with our site
doesn't work. This doesn't happen very often, so its not really a big
problem, I usually just reboot and it works again. But I just thought I would
post this to see what people have to say about it.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Hi everyone, this is the weirdest problem ever! At work I'm using a Window XP
machine, everything works fine and dandy. But sometimes I can't access our
website, email or ftp site. This would obviously lead you to beleive its a
network issue...but..our website, email and ftp site are hosted off-site. I
can get to all other stuff on the internet, but anything to do with our site
doesn't work. This doesn't happen very often, so its not really a big
problem, I usually just reboot and it works again. But I just thought I would
post this to see what people have to say about it.

Have you asked the company hosting your site if they've had any
problems? That would certainly be the first place I'd check.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

Hi everyone, this is the weirdest problem ever! At work I'm using a
Window XP machine, everything works fine and dandy. But sometimes I
can't access our website, email or ftp site. This would obviously
lead you to beleive its a network issue...but..our website, email and
ftp site are hosted off-site. I can get to all other stuff on the
internet, but anything to do with our site doesn't work. This doesn't
happen very often, so its not really a big problem, I usually just
reboot and it works again. But I just thought I would post this to
see what people have to say about it.

In addition to Ray's reply (which may be right on track if you're using AD),
if this works "sometimes" it means your AD DNS can't possibly be set up
right. If you have mycompany.com for your AD domain name and mycompany.com
is your actual Internet domain name, hosted elsewhere, your own internal DNS
server(s) should *never* let you find the (external) www.mycompany.com
without having the appropriate hosts/records set up to point at the public
IPs for each - it would look for www in-house & fail as it thinks it is
authoritative for mycompany.com.

If it's working sometimes, it sounds like you have public DNS servers
specified in your IP config, which is a big no-no in AD. After you set up
the appropriate records in your forward lookup zone in DNS, you should look
into this. All servers and workstations should specify *only* the internal
AD-integrated DNS server's IP address in their network settings. The
AD-integrated DNS server should be set up with forwarders to your ISP's DNS
servers for external resolution and/or use root hints.