Possible DNS issue only affecting Macs

[Mr_Rabbit]

I'm not sure whether this would be better asked here or in the virtual forum. I'm giving this a shot first though since it seems to be an issue localized to Macs.

 

In our building we have a couple of different Windows file servers that are typically reachable by connecting via smb and the server name in Finder, such as smb://Server1

 

A couple of days ago one of our network engineers moved one of these file servers to vmware. Following the process all of the Windows machines & 10.6 Macs can connect using the short server name but our 10.7 & 10.8 machines can only reach it by using the IP address or FQDN, such as smb://Server1.department.domain.extension. Attempting to connect using smb://Server1 in 10.7 & 10.8 will eventually time out with "There was a problem connecting to the server 'Server 1'. The Server may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again." The only exception to this that I've found is our 10.7 server, it can connect via smb://Server1.

 

This feels like a DNS issue but with the Windows boxes, 10.6 Macs and the 10.7 server connecting I'm at somewhat of a loss.

 

Anyone run into a similar situation when migrating a file server over to a virtualized environment? Any ideas?

Edited March 6, 2013 by Mr_Rabbit

[nicklec]

Put your domain in 'search domains' - this is possible via dhcp

[Mr_Rabbit]

Put your domain in 'search domains' - this is possible via dhcp

 

Thanks for the reply! The domain is already listed as the search domain in network settings. I should have mentioned that these machines are part of a golden triangle configuration, where they pull domain & account info from Active Directory and some management settings from Open Directory. The domain info is populated during the binding process.

 

One more bit of info, pinging "Server1" is successful, packets make the round trip and the FQDN populates automatically. This seems to just be something with the SMB side of things. I know there have been issues starting with 10.7 regarding SMB connectivity but we haven't had any issues for the most part, at least until now, following the migration of the file server to a VM.

 

Any other ideas?

[nicklec]

Ping generally isn't very good for troubleshooting DNS, do you get the expected replies from nslookup?

[Mr_Rabbit]

Our network guy figured it out. Here are his findings, could be helpful if anyone ever does a similar migration that results in a similar issue.

 

Using the smbutil lookup command in terminal I was able to see that the Macs were resolving the NETBIOS name of the server to two wrong IP addresses. Since SMB uses WINS to resolve names I was able to find the offending IP addresses by querying the WINS list. I deleted the old ones out and put them in statically for Server1.

This happened because converting to vsphere does not bring over network info since it assigns new nics. The new nics picked up DHCP and were then registered into WINS and DNS this way. We changed DNS right away making it work for the FQDN and for Windows machines. Something to do after the conversion next time.