Unable to get DNS name resolution

Hello everyone,

I'm a first time poster. I've been seeing a number of machines that are unable to get name resolution. Everything looks installed correctly on networking, but when I try to ping named addresses I get a "host unknown" error but if I ping that same address using it's IP i have no problem.

I work for a University and the machines that have been having this trouble range from Windows 98 to Windows ME.

One other site where I have found some information on this suggests doing a registry hack to remove Winsock2, delete dial-up networking and then reinstall dial-up networking.

However this does not seem to work all the time.

The only sure fire way we have been able to find to fix the problem is to reinstall windows.

Can anyone shead any light on what is causing the problem and if there is any easier fix then reinstalling windows?

Thanks,

Justin Chan

 

Do you have a proxy client installed?
Win9x clients really don't come with TCP/IP troubleshooting tools like nslookup, so you may want to try a network sniffer to find out if your Win9x clients are sending a request and just not getting a response, or not sending a request at all.
Several packet sniffers are out there, but I recommend Ethereal. Just search google.com for it. You'll find it.