Weird dns/nameserver issue

I have a mix of windows and linux machines on my network and all the windows machines can ping and access other machines via the machine names including the router itself by \mynetn900

But the linux machines always resolve any machine name I put to a specific IP that is outside my network. I have no idea what this machine is that they are resolving to.

For example if my two linux machines are called ABC and XYZ. From ABC, if I ping XYZ, it goes to an external 67.63.x.x IP which is always the same. What’s interesting is if I do a ping test12345 or ping TUV which don’t exist, it also goes to this same IP.

Both linux machines are set for dhcp with a reservation on the router side. Both have 192.168.1.1 as their dns server verified with nslookup.

Windows machines ping both ABC and XYZ fine and resolve to their proper 192.168.1.x IPs.

Any thoughts?

vladware wrote:

I have a mix of windows and linux machines on my network and all the windows machines can ping and access other machines via the machine names including the router itself by \mynetn900

 

But the linux machines always resolve any machine name I put to a specific IP that is outside my network. I have no idea what this machine is that they are resolving to.

 

For example if my two linux machines are called ABC and XYZ. From ABC, if I ping XYZ, it goes to an external 67.63.x.x IP which is always the same. What’s interesting is if I do a ping test12345 or ping TUV which don’t exist, it also goes to this same IP.

 

Both linux machines are set for dhcp with a reservation on the router side. Both have 192.168.1.1 as their dns server verified with nslookup.

 

Windows machines ping both ABC and XYZ fine and resolve to their proper 192.168.1.x IPs.

 

Any thoughts?

 

 

When I was a regular there used to be a Linux guy called Myron in here and I don’t know if he still posts.

I don’t think there’s not much anyone can tell you if the windows PC’s are not doing that as it could be a problem with the Linux boxes, or they finding things that windows doesn’t. WD won’t help either because they don’t support Linux but try to see if you can contact Myron (An hope he has a WD router).

As an update, it doesn’t resolve hostnames from Android or iPhones either. 

Got a hold of a macbook and same thing on mac. Every name pings to the same external IP address. So I know that WD doesn’t support Linux but what about Macs and iphones?

vladware wrote:

Got a hold of a macbook and same thing on mac. Every name pings to the same external IP address. So I know that WD doesn’t support Linux but what about Macs and iphones?

They don’t support iphones.

Call them if you’re having issues with the Mac.

If you run ifconfig on a terminal in the linux box what do you see for DNS?  Is it your routers address or something different?  Looks like your linux boxes has an external address for DNS lookup probably your service provider’s DNS address.  Try enabling DNS proxy on your router, this should make your clients use the router for DNS resolution and not a direct external address.  Theoretically it should work unless there is a fault with this router.

If it was just one machine then I would say it’s machine specific but I have my ubuntu machine, raspberry pi, iphone, s3, and macbook all doing the same thing. I did double check the dns server and it seems correct.

I’ve played around with the dns proxy and the Master browser setting on the router. Turning off dns proxy disabled my access to get to anything on the internet vai name. Master browser doesn’t seem to do anything that I can tell.

It also all worked fine on my previous netgear wndr3700 router.

Very interesting finding. Turns out even windows can’t resolve the name from DNS. But it pings somehow. Don’t know how windows is able to resolve names for ping and other stuff but not from nslookup.

Edit: Did some digging and it turns out windows will use zeroconf to resolve names on the local network when the DNS doesn’t return anything.

Does this mean the mynet routers do not actually keep the host names that dhcp clients provide in it’s DNS record? Or am I missing some setting?