I am having a tough time narrowing this problem down. It’s been aggravating me ever since I got this new workstation. Anyway, here goes:
I had a previous workstation running Vista Ultimate 32 and never had an issue with it in the exact same location. Now, with my new station running Vista Business 32, I have had on and off trouble connecting to anything on the domain via hostnames. I can’t even resolve the addresses to ping them, but if I ping their specific address, I’ll get replies flawlessly.
for example, say my active directory server’s name is actived, and it’s address address is 192.168.1.2, my ping will look like this:
c:\>ping actived
Pinging actived.domain.org [xx.xx.xx.xx] with 32 bytes of data: (the xx.xx.xx.xx is the ip of our local DNS server for our internal and external webserv)
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
you get the picture.
C:\>ping 192.168.1.2
Pinging 192.168.1.2 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.1.2: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
To further complicate things, we use DameWare to do remote administration to our computers, and without being able to resolve hostnames, this program is virtually unusable. However, I have discovered that if I open my "Network Neighborhood" as it were, and refresh it, I can sometimes connect to remote computers, at least for a short period of time. I had similar issuse with outlook connecting to our exchange server, and often a refresh of network would fix it, however I have been unable to connect to our exchange box since thursday unless I use web access, despite rebuilding my account on my local machine, numerous reboots and refreshes to the network.
All the while that this is going on, my internet connection is flawless, domain logons go smoothly no matter which profile I'm using, authentication works fine, and as long as I know the IP of where I want to go, I can get anywhere I want, so connectivity is not a problem.
This has been driving my BONKERS for about a month, I hope someone can shed some light on this one.