ugh

[mellowtigger]

I think maybe I got 2 hours of sleep.  Now, it's off to work at 5am, then drive out to Buffalo by 8am.

We're switching network infrastructure today.  I'm wishing everything was DHCP right now instead of static ip address.

Micromanagement requires large amounts of attention.

Comments

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

It's never too late to come to your freakin' senses and switch to DHCP.

[mellowtigger]

We have an unexplained DNS problem in our domain network, so I understand the reluctance to rely on DNS for giving us access to pcs throughout our enterprise. Still, though, we're large enough that micromanagement really shouldn't be an option. I learned from roommate/landlord foeclan this week that DHCP can be made to hand out specific ip addresses to specific MAC ids. Such a setup would offer us the best of both worlds. A single common DHCP setting for all clients, along with specific ip address for each destination.

In case any reader can offer a solution, the nature of our DNS problem is:

Any time we have a "blip" in network connectivity at a site in our Windows domain (named "ahs.org" unfortunately), individual pcs end up learning to resolve certain host names to an external internet ip address (American Horticultural Society, aka "ahs.org").

Only those internal host names which happen to have a duplicate name out there on the internet are affected. We have hardcoded HOSTS file records on all of our servers for those affected names, yet client pcs still somehow learn to talk elsewhere for name resolution during a network blip.

We reboot the client pc after the network is stable, and name resolution occurs properly again. We've looked over DNS records at all our servers repeatedly but can't find the fault. I'm beginning to wonder if some other Microsoft service is taking precedence (WINS/NetBIOS/LMHOSTS) over DHCP for some reason and providing external addresses even though internal ones are available through DNS.

*ignorant and frustrated shrug*

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

Close port 53 on the gateway router? I mean, the clients must be querying some DNS server somewhere. If it's internal, kill it. If it's external, block it.

Have you looked at the logs on the clients?

[Pardon me if these are hopelessly stupid comments. I tend to know just enough about networking to be really dangerous.]