DNS / Windows Name resolution problem - was OpenDNS' fault, fixed

ProPatriaMori

This one's got me frustrated. I have a couple of computers behind my router--the one that matters is named \\blackbox, because it is in a black case.

I used to have trouble getting my router to give me its IP; it'd just say "not found" or whatever until I pinged what IP I guessed it was enough times for it to decide to resolve. Now I'm having trouble because the blackbox request is going out with my ISP suffix, heading to blackbox.grandenetworks.net, which is somewhere in...Chicago, it looks like.

How do I get name resolution to try the LAN first and find my \\blackbox before going off into the cloud to find some other jerk's blackbox?

pacbowl

You can do a quick and dirty fix by editing your hosts file and adding the line "x.x.x.x blackbox"

ProPatriaMori

That's very dirty. I'd rather leave DHCP on. Thanks though.

I think I've figured it out, though. That computer in Chicago isn't named blackbox--it's OpenDNS' fucking "oops we can't find that" webserver. No longer using OpenDNS, problem is gone.

My opinion for them is now very, very poor.

codetrap

It's not openDNS fault that they don't know the computername of your computer blackbox. That's entirely your fault as it's your responsibility to maintain your local lan in such a way that your pc's will register themselves in your local dns server if you have one.

Now, pacbowl's suggestion of simply adding the line to your hosts file is a perfectly valid one, and won't affect your dhcp, or internet based dns resolution at all. Provided that you're dealing with under 10 computers, it's probably the simplest one as well. Another possible solution would be to install the "client for microsoft networks" on all your local pcs, and set them up in the same workgroup. Provided they're all on the same broadcast domain, they should be able resolve themselves.

The only time that opendns would be responsible for resolving to "blackbox" would be in the event that you had a public static ip registered to that domain name, and assigned to that pc statically. Since you've mentioned DHCP, that's pretty unlikely.

ProPatriaMori

codetrap wrote: »

It's not openDNS fault that they don't know the computername of your computer blackbox. That's entirely your fault as it's your responsibility to maintain your local lan in such a way that your pc's will register themselves in your local dns server if you have one.

Now, pacbowl's suggestion of simply adding the line to your hosts file is a perfectly valid one, and won't affect your dhcp, or internet based dns resolution at all. Provided that you're dealing with under 10 computers, it's probably the simplest one as well. Another possible solution would be to install the "client for microsoft networks" on all your local pcs, and set them up in the same workgroup. Provided they're all on the same broadcast domain, they should be able resolve themselves.

The only time that opendns would be responsible for resolving to "blackbox" would be in the event that you had a public static ip registered to that domain name, and assigned to that pc statically. Since you've mentioned DHCP, that's pretty unlikely.

You see, that's the thing. They would resolve blackbox, they would resolve thisdomainshouldneverregister, they would resolve ANYTHING. So my router didn't fall back and look at my LAN, it got a shit IP from OpenDNS.

Pacbowl's suggestion is valid unless that computer is on DHCP, which it is. A hosts entry is static, right? No bueno. I mean, it'd work, but no bueno enough, you know? I'd rather just leave everything DHCPing away.

Granted, you'd think the router would look at NetBIOS names (finally remembered what they were called before) before looking upstream, but for some reason it didn't. Maybe if I'd left 0.0.0.0 as the DNS server and OpenDNS in the second two.

tl;dr: OpenDNS shouldn't do name resolution on names it doesn't think exists, but that's what it does. If you start getting weird name resolution and use OpenDNS, maybe it's the problem, because it was my problem.

codetrap

Your pc will look in it's own dns cache first, then it will query it's dns server, (your router) will will then query opendns.

Personally, on my local lan of 6 devices, what I did was set up static dhcp entries based on the mac address. That way, the client always get's the same ip via dhcp. This is important for me as I have rules for QOS based on ip/port configuration for my work laptop when I bring it home, and it has to be on dhcp for the office. I then put in the 6 entries on each computer's hosts file, so that I'd have instant resolution. It cut down issues with using the shared printer here at home, and resolution issues getting to the local fileserver, as well as the tv server. As far as my laptop (and all the other clients) are concerned, they're all still fully DHCP. And finally, I cut down the network size to a /28 network so it would only assign ip's to a max of 14 hosts.. that way, I would always know what guests on my lan got for ip's, and if I needed to map them to the printer, I could do it by ip.

Now, if your pc's are always querying dns first, and opendns is trying to resolve everything no matter what, then you need make sure that you have client for MS networks in the binding oer on your network configuration.