Re: Mac DNS Problem

Jordyn A. Buchanan (jordyn@bestweb.net)
Sun, 31 Aug 1997 13:45:10 -0400

At 12:35 PM -0400 8/31/97, Computer Aide wrote:
>Here's a weird one.....Have 3 people on mac's in 3 different towns having
>the same problem starting last night. PC's are not having a problem.
>
>They get connected and can get mail, our home page, but everywhere else they
>try to go to says dns not found.
>
>They can get the sites by IP address.

Any chance one of your DNS servers is having a problem (the one that these
users' MacTCP thinks is default)?

My guess is that the following are all true:

1) The users are all using MacTCP as opposed to Open Transport.
2) Everyone has the domain set to "cvn.net" (or whatever) for all DNS
servers listed in MacTCP.
3) Tne DNS server which is selected as "Default" for all of these
users is not functioning correctly.

The problem is that MacTCP doesn't behave quite like you'd expect it to.
If there is a domain filled in, it tries to use that DNS server only to
look up addresses within that domain. (If the domain is set to ".", MacTCP
will try to look up any address at the server listed.) If MacTCP can't
find an appropriate server for the domain in question, it will try the
default server.

The reason why DNS for hosts in your domain is still working is that you
have another DNS machine. As long as the domain matches, MacTCP will try
to do a DNS lookup on that machine. Everything else is completely
dependent on the Default machine operating correctly.

Open Transport and TCP/IP stacks on other operating systems generally try
the first server and then the next one and then the next one until it find
one that works. So, if one of your DNS servers is misbehaving, most of
your users would probably never notice, but the Mac users that are
basically depending on that single machine would suddenly have some
problems.

Good ways to fix this problem:

1) Fix your DNS server.
2) Encourage your users to migrate from MacTCP to OpenTransport.
3) Go into MacTCP and replace the domain listed for DNS entries with "."
This will all of your servers responsible for the entire namespace.

Jordyn

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|Jordyn A. Buchanan mailto:jordyn@bestweb.net |
|Bestweb Corporation http://www.bestweb.net |
|Senior System Administrator +1.914.271.4500 |
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