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DNS issue

On a Windows 2003 server....

After 2-3 years of working fine...all the stations on this network could no longer find www.mycompanysite.com.
The site could be accessed from outside the network, however.

The people who wrote the site made some changes to DNS by adding:
Forward lookup zone:
mycompanysite.com

Under that we added:
(same as parent folder) Mail Exchanger(Mx) [10] mail.mycompanysite.com
Mail Host [A] ip address
www Host [A] same ip address

After that, the problem went away. Before I get their explanation, I like input from this site.
Why would the above fix the problem?

I could see adding a forward lookup zone, but I am not sure why they added it the way they did.

thanks.

sgstuart

Hi glenn 1984,
I am assuming that you have your own internal DNS servers as well for inside your company. My guess is what happened is the DNS server for inside got changed somehow, and the alias to the server of the DNS name or host header is missing.

If things on the outside have worked the whole time, which uses a different DNS server than your company, which it sounds like what you are saying. I can not say that the above is the proper way to do things, as I am actually not in our DNS group, I am the owner of over 450 web and application servers though. Every now and then an alias needs to be placed back in properly. You should always test with pings and nslookup commands to make sure everything is pointing properly

ping IP Address
ping www.mycompanysite.com
nslookup www.mycompanysite.com
nslookup IP Address

This will make sure that all IP Addresses and names, and Aliases are pointing properly.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

Glenn Abelson

ASKER

Inside, the only DNS was to the server ON the server.
The router had the DNS for the website and the ISP.

sgstuart

Hi Glenn,
Is it possible that the router has lost that setting?

If you remove what you did, what are the results of the pings and nslookups above?

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

Glenn Abelson

ASKER

Unfortunately this is a strange setup.
I am the consultant for the system from the Hub/Switch and everything inside of that.
Another companhy support the routers and the web site.

It is not too important to me to discover why it happened.

I am more interested in understanding the logic behind the configuration above.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

sgstuart

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