I am a software developer, I don’t know much about networks. I have a working network but with one weird (well to me it’s weird) problem. If you can offer any insight I’ll be very grateful!
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That’s my network… well a simple diagram anyway. The only thing important I left out was this…. On the Windows 2000 Server, which is the Primary Domain Controller and DNS server… there are two addresses in the DNS forwarding for the domain MyCompanyName.com… they point to the DNS servers of my ISP… they are real world addresses… I understand DNS enough to know my Server needs to forward on any queries it can’t resolve.
I am trying to figure out why my company is having severe problems browsing its own Internet site… yet is able to surf the web whilst streaming iTunes and browsing Google Earth concurrently quite happily (i.e. the network seems to perform very well indeed otherwise!)
I installed the Windows 2000 Server, creating a domain and naming it after my company… .it seemed the right thing to do according to the Windows 2000 domain set up process, they had an example name for the domain (I think it was Microsoft.com)… so I called it “MyCompanyName.com”…. In fact I think I tried to call the domain just “MyCompanyName” but the set up forced me to put a ‘dot’ something… so I went with the example and put .com after my company name.
I am wondering if this is the problem… my internal domain which all my workstations live on is called MyCompany.com…. And I am trying to browse to
http://www.mycompany.com.au (which is hosted externally…. We definitely don’t have the capacity to host our own web server!! )
So I was thinking the DNS lookup process then goes nuts trying to find the outside
http://www.mycompany.com.au server when my internal domain is called mycompany.com… is there any truth to this? The reality is that the workstations ARE resolving the name via DNS because the page loads…. But failed images and about a minute or so to load a simple page with a few images… sometimes stylesheets don’t load etc. etc. it’s NOT the server our website is hosted on… I literally walk 200 metres down the road to an internet café and test the website from there (sometimes I have to because I get so frustrated trying to load the pages from my network…. Even though I can browse any other website. Same behaviour from all workstations / laptops in network! )
I thought I would investigate / test what I could in case I found something… I tried:
i. Putting an entry in a workstations HOST file for
http://www.mycompany.com.au. As a developer we have to do this all the time to control local web servers…. So I figured if the problem was DNS then the workstation would all of a sudden be able to happily connect to my company’s external website properly…. Nope… same performance…. (I did a ipconfig /flushdns at the command prompt before testing too)
ii. Looking into renaming my Domain…. Hmmm… Windows 2000 domain rename needs a BDC with Win NT etc. etc…. Man, I gave up on that, I’d rather re-install Windows 2000 Server and go through the process of re-building!
Do I need to put a special forward or reverse entry lookup thingy in DNS?
Is there such a thing as ‘slow’ DNS in a network like mine?
Do requests for resources like images from Internet Explorer end up in multiple DNS queries?? (Does DNS happen on a packet level?? Argghh… why is this so complicated! WoooF!) …
…or am I barking up the wrong tree?