DNS does not work with one PC on network

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andy Turner
  • Start date Start date
A

Andy Turner

I'm having a problem which sounds similar to that which others are
having, but not quite the same.

I have four XP Pro PCs on a router/gateway to the internet. All can
access the internet. Three of them talk to each other happily in the
workgroup, one does not. I can access shares on the 'bad' PC via IP
addresses but these are dynamically allocated so sometimes change
around. The three good PCs can ping each other using their machine
name, but the bad one fails to look-up the name. They can all ping
each other using IP addresses. Any of the good PCs cannot ping the bad
one using machine name, only IP address.

It's as if the bad PC isn't working with the DNS server, either by
being able to do look-ups with it, or to register itself with it. It
gets an IP from DHCP quite happily though. All four PCs have all their
TCP/IP settings as 'auto' (IP, gateway, DNS etc..)

All settings are the same for all PCs as far as I can tell. And I've
tried the NetBIOS over TCP/IP setting as suggested elsewhere.

Is there something I can run to see what/where the DNS server is (is
it the router?), and perform test lookups, other than by trying to
ping something? Any other tools I can use to try and determine the
difference with this one PC? IPConfig /all seems to be the same for
all PCs.


Cheers


andyt
 
Hi Andy,

It really looks like a DNS problem,from what you describe. It looks like
the machines cannot resolve the name to the IP address, now, there are a
couple of things you can do to solve this:

The DNS service is provided by your ISP in this case as you don't have a
server. To be honest with you, I would turn off the DHCP on the router,
give all PCs static IP addresses, and set the gateway address -> router (of
course).
Also, place the DNS server/s of your ISP, if you can get 2 even better, in
the appropriate box/es of all machines.

The other thing is to place entries in the hosts file. You can find this
file in your C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc folder (Windows is %systemroot%
or where your windows system files are installed).

Open the hosts file with notepad and the format is the following:

IP address Name

192.168.0.10 pc1
use a tab between the 2, save the file and copy it on all the PCs on the
network. this will solve, and I am sure of it (being an ol' UNIX guy) your
troubles, at least I hope.

Best to you

regards

GB
 
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