DNS Problems

lan

I'm trying to fix a pc for my friend. It won't resolve host names to IP addresses and I can't figure out why. It's running windows XP.

It can connect to the internet or my home network fine but if I type in say www.boards.ie I get a dns error where as it works if I use 82.195.131.128 (the IP address of boards.ie). It's not internet explorers problem as ping won't work with host names either. I've tried both manually setting DNS servers and letting it automatically detect them but still nothing. I can ping the servers so I know it can see them. I've tried reinstalling TCP/IP aswell but the problem is still there.

Formatting/reinstalling windows isn't an option unfortunatly so has anyone got any suggestions on what to do?

Thanks

Ian

dregin

Is your hosts file still there? on win2k pro its in C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc .Probably no help, bu mine was inadvertently deleted a few days back and caused some problems..its just called hosts with no extension.

lan

Nope, that's not the problem but thanks anyway

ressem

Can you try:

Go to the command prompt,

type in

nslookup
google.com

and you should get the ip addresses for google.

or
X can't find google.com: No response from server
or similar.

If the latter maybe your ISP is having problems, maybe outgoing DNS requests (port 53) are blocked by a firewall except from the server or whatever.

Though you should try different DNS servers
159.134.237.6 is accessable by everyone.

so
nslookup

server 159.134.237.6
google.com

--

Or if you've somehow got obsolete entries cached on your machine
ipconfig /flushdns

should mean that all entries are retrieved from scratch.

In short, need more info to resolve. Post results and we'll rule out scenarios.

cheers

lan

It's definitly not an ISP problem, it couldn't resolve the names of the other pc's on my network.

Flushing the DNS cache doesn't fix it.

nslookup does return the correct IP address though.

Any ideas on what could be wrong?

Thanks for the reply.

swiss

I could be well off the mark here, but couldn't you try resetting TCP/IP

In Windows XP I believe you can run the following command from the command line

netsh int ip reset <reset log name>

in most cases

netsh int ip reset reset will do it.

Bear in mind that you will have to reconfigure your TCP/IP connections once you do this. Terms and conditions apply*. Check here for more information.


*If your PC should blow up and burn down the house while you're doing it don't blame me.

lan

I've already tried resetting tcp/ip, it made no difference unfortunatly.

mrterry

Throw up the output of ipconfig /all here

Gerry

This happened to me before, but only because I was disabling loads of services to save memory. Go to administrative tools -> services, and have a good read through the list. Make sure every networking related service is started. Some are obviously named ( eg Dns Helper ), others less so.

lan

I've looked at

ipconfig/all

and I don't see anything wrong but I'll post it anyway when I can get to the machine.

I don't think it's one of the services not running, I looked through the list before and everything network related was started...