domain can't connect to outside host

Able to open any websites through internet explorer except for our comapny domain ( Domain works fine form any other computer not connected to server running windows server 2003. Any other domains work through all 3 computers in network. Only domain that fails is our company domain *** Links removed by site staff so it doesn't look like you're spamming. ***
Has our company domain been restricted by person who installed Windows Server 2003 or has it been pointed to be hosted locally instead of in the www ???

 

This is a common problem if you use your internet domain name for your internal domain. As far as you internal network is concerned, the DNS server on the 2003 server is definitive authority on all the names in the address space defined for it. Therefore, if an address appears on it's domain and it doesn't know about it, it won't look elsewhere for it.

There are two fixes.

First don't use your external domain name for your local network. Use a .local address instead. This is the best advice, but not much help in your situations.

So second fix: tell your DNS service about the external resources you need to access from the local network. For example, say your domain was domain.thing, and you needed to access an external address of www.domain.thing. 'domain.thing' is the domain zone, and 'www' is the host name. So what you need to do is add an A Host record for the host 'www' to the DNS zone 'domain.thing'.

Therefore, I expect the first thing you need to do is add an A Host record to your main DNS zone for the host 'www' with an IP address for your external web server. That is the address your company address space resolves to on a system where it works (you can use nslookup to determine the address).

 

Domain works now; have to type www to access it

Thank you so much. That was indeed the problem. The IT person who set up Windows Server 2003 used the .com instead of .local for the internal domain.
Any other website can be accessed from the user terminals by simply typing the domain name without the www, but our company domain will only work using the www in front of it.
Now we have a second problem. The e-mail addresss @ the domain won't work. When I ping the mail server it does not resolve either.
Would I need another record for the e-mail to work? Do I need one for each person with an e-mail account?

 

Where is your mailserver? Is it an internal mailserver (for example Exchange) running on a local server?

 

Can't connect to .com domain mail server

The mail server is through our company outside domain also.
For example, an e-mail address would be user@domain name.com
and user2@domain name.com

 

OK - What e-mail client do they use?

If it is something like Outlook, Eudora, or Thunderbird, have a look at the setting for the server. If SMTP and POP (or IMAP) are pointing at a mailserver by name, that's the name you have to set up in DNS.

So if it is mailserver.domain.something, you'd have to create an A record for mailserver in the domain.something zone on your DNS server.

 

Mail Server

We use Outlook 2003 and 2007
incoming mailserver would be mail.domain.com
outgoing mailserver would be mail.domain.com
Once we enter a record for the mail server, do we have to go back each time to add a new person or would that work for anybody else in the future we add? (like bob@domainname.com, sue@domainname.com and so on)

 

You only have to do it once. That is, add an A record for 'mail' in the domain zone at you DNS server.

You can forget about MX records and what actually happens to create each individual mailbox. That's handled by the mail server and your ISP's DNS servers. All you need to do is provide a way for your Outlook clients to be able to find the mail server and connect to it. Once they can connect to the mail server, job done.

 

Adding mail server to DNS zone

Thanks, going to try to do that. It looks like we will get this to work without having to reinstall windows server 2003. It says in the information that if a domain.local wasn't used and instead the domain.com was used, the only way to change all that is reinstall server 2003.
Is there a way to be able to just type the domain.com without the www into the internet explorer address bar? right now, it only works if you type the www in front. If you type just the domain name as you would for any other domain, it comes back with internet explorer can't display this page.

 

I think you could produce an A or CNAME record for the whole domain, but I think that might cause you other problems as this address would match the domain used for a lot of internal networking name resolution.

I'd avoid resolving the domain name to an external resource. I think it will cause a lot of unforeseen problems. I may be wrong; you could try it and see, but I'd avoid it.