Solved
Cannot ping external IP/web address from LAN, yet can access site fine
Posted on 2009-03-31
Embarking on a trip down the rabbit hole that started with Wordpress but is ending up with crazy DNS issues - hoping someone can help! My LAN network is set up with a Windows 2003 box which hosts DNS, a 10.5.6 Mac server which hosts our website, DHCP, and other various things, all behind a Netgear FVX538 firewall box.
The Mac server hosts our Wordpress website - recently I had been trying to start hosting a podcast for the Wordpress blog. Wordpress normally supports auto enclosures of media files, but that wasn't working, which I thought was strange. After much searching and testing, I realized that something was amiss with DNS that was most likely causing the issue.
I can ACCESS my website from the LAN (both on the server it's being hosted from and other computers in the LAN) but PINGING either the external IP or the domain name doesn't work. It pings for one entry, spits back the IP address, then stops with no other error message or notification of any kind. I can ping other external sites just fine, and can ping internal IP addresses just fine as well.
I'm not sure if this is a DNS problem, although it seems safe to say that it is. And because I've noticed no other issues, I'm not really sure where to begin in figure out what the problem is. It seems that there's some issue going on with internal DNS, so if anyone has advice of what I should look for, please let me know!