Can't resolve internal/private DNS entries over VPN connection

Question

I have a basic VPN setup that allows me to connect to my AWS VPC via an OpenVPN client (tunnelblick 3.5). There is an OpenVPN sever (Ubuntu 12.4) that is running in the VPC which creates the connection. The VPN works fine as i am able to ping any private IP address in my VPC. My problem is that I cannot ping any of my private/internal DNS entires that point to private IP addresses.

For example, I can ping the the private IP 10.10.10.10, but I can't ping the private DNS entry server.pvt.company.com, which points to 10.10.10.10.

If I SSH onto any instance in the VPC I can ping server.pvt.company.com, and it resolves to 10.10.10.10, but this fails to work on my local when the VPN connection is up.

Here is my OpenVPN server.conf:

port 1194
proto udp
dev tun
ca ca.crt
cert blah.crt
key blah.key
dh dh1024.pem
server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0
ifconfig-pool-persist ipp.txt
push "route 10.10.0.0 255.255.0.0"
push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8"
push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.4.4"
keepalive 10 120
comp-lzo
persist-key
persist-tun
status openvpn-status.log

Here is my OpenVPN client.conf:

client
dev tun
proto udp
remote blah.company.com 1194
resolv-retry infinite
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
ca ca.crt
cert me.crt
key me.key
ns-cert-type server
comp-lzo
verb 3

Any suggestions for figuring out how to resolve or push private/internal DNS entires over an OpenVPN connection?

Solution

Your server is pushing the Google DNS servers to the client:

push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.8.8"
push "dhcp-option DNS 8.8.4.4"

You'll want to push a local DNS server that knows how to resolve your local hostnames instead.