DNS Problems causing clients to lose Internet access?

I am having a problem that I believe is being caused by my DNS configuration. Let me begin by saying I am running Windows SBS 2003. When I first setup the server, I did not have an Internet domain for the server. Therefore, the initial setup was "domainname.local ". After I registered my domain name, I changed the server name to "domainname.com ".

Until recently, the DNS settings did not have a "domainname.com" zone. What I tried to do was get rid of all the old DNS settings and restart with the new "domainname.com" zone. Everything seemed to work fine for a few days but then my client computers became unable to access the Internet. All of the client computers have been setup after I had the ".com" domain, so I don't think that the problem lies there.

I apologize if I am not explaining this well as it is a complicated situation and I also am very far from being familiar with DNS issues. If you are wondering why I even messed with the settings in the first place, (it is a valid question), it is because I was getting error messages based on the old "domainname.local" settings.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here or am I hopelessly lost?

Thanks,

SMF

 

To save myself lots of typing I refer you to This thread on Experts Exchange.

Same problem, same fix. Basically, you have told your SBS server that it is a high-level, authoritative (internet) DNS server and your clients to look to it for internet name resolution but it doesn't know any and doesn't know who to ask.

Very common mistake with SBS and with AD server setup since it wants to make the local DNS into a root server.

 

Can you give us some ipconfigs to see if you have the basics correct?

From a cmd prompt:

C:\ipconfig /all >C:\ipconfig.txt

Then go to C:ipconfig.text and paste the contents here.

Do one on the server and one or two clients.

Thanks,

 

Thanks for the link Newt, there was a lot of helpful info there. I followed those procedures and I thought that might be the problem, but that doesn't seem to be it. My DNS config did not have the root zone ( ". ") entry. There were some other settings that I found and corrected in going through those links, but I am still having problems.

A few interesting things though:

• On the client computers, I can ping web sites (by name).
• One of the KB articles I stumbled onto from one of the links led me to an interesting possibility (KB 292822) "Name resolution and connectivity issues on a Routing and Remote Access Server that also runs DNS or WINS" - I have recently started using remote vpn connections...
• I occasionally have the following error message in my DNS event log: "The DNS server could not signal the service "NAT ". The error was 1168. There may be interoperability problems between the DNS service and this service. "

The thing that is really bugging me is that everything was running fine for a long time and only recently did this start happening. I am trying to narrow down the changes that I have made recently, but I have been doing so many different things that it is becoming difficult to determine if it definitely is a DNS problem anymore.

I am listing here the recent Microsoft updates that have recently been applied to my server as well:

Exchange Server 2003 Update for Exchange Server 2003 (KB888619) Thursday, October 27, 2005 Microsoft Update website
Office 2002/XP Update for Access 2002 (KB904018) Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Microsoft Update website
Exchange Server 2003 Security Update for Exchange Server 2003 SP1 (KB894549) Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Microsoft Update website
Office 2002/XP Security Update for Word 2002 (KB895589) Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Microsoft Update website
Windows Server 2003 Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2 (KB887624) Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Microsoft Update website
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB905414) Saturday, October 22, 2005 Automatic Updates
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB904706) Saturday, October 22, 2005 Automatic Updates
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB900725) Saturday, October 22, 2005 Automatic Updates
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB901017) Saturday, October 22, 2005 Automatic Updates
Windows Server 2003 Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - October 2005 (KB890830) Saturday, October 22, 2005 Automatic Updates

Is it possible one of the recent updates could have caused a problem? Possibly the Sharepoint Services Update? The problem seems to have begun soon after this update.

 

After posting this, I realized I should try re-running the ICW after changing all of the settings I had changed.

After I ran that, I rebooted the client computers and everything works fine.

Apparently it was somewhere in the DNS settings after all...My mind was starting to meltdown after staring at this for so long...

Thanks again!

 

Been there, done that, got a drawer full of the tee shirts.