Unable to resolve FQDN, hostname works

Question

We are having an issue where computers who are not part of the domain cannot resolve the FQDN of a server (but regular hostname and ip do resolve). The strange thing is that this does work when the computer is added to the network.

Our domain name is rather long, its something along the lines of "team.dept.company.com", could that be it?

DHCP server passes along the proper DNS, Name and WINS servers, as well as the domain name. I thought that should've solved the problem, but apparently not really.

Our domain is still windows2003

EDIT: I am starting to believe I can narrow this down to a problem either with the vmware tools NIC drivers that are embedded in my winPE boot image, or to the fact that I'm trying to do this from inside a VM. Pinging a FQDN at the same time when using a different task sequence on a physical machine works.

Solution

From what I gather Hannes, you are using either MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) or WDS (Windows Deployment Server). In that case, when you load into the PE environment you are not going to be able to interact with the resources you are trying to by design from Microsoft. It's funny you'd ask this, because I just worked with a Microsoft consultant today on this very thing. The PE environment is designed to keep a sort of hedge, if you will, around the systems that are having an OS deployed to them. To interact with them you will need the right drivers for not only the PE environment, but also your system.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure you're talking about MDT with PE environment loading from PXE. Let me know and I can troubleshoot further for you.

A link for reference: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/440812-imaging-with-mdt-and-wds-networking-issues

Comments

[APR]

When/How do you try to resolve an FQDN? What does it say when it fails?

[Andrii Y.]

Another thing that came to mind is the fact that to boot in winPE in a VM and have a network connection, you need to add drivers to the winPE boot image. Could this be a driver issue rather than DNS issue?

[Ryan Babchishin]

I see you tried to ping the FQDN. Can you ping the DNS servers by IP? If that works, can you query them with nslookup?

[Andrii Y.]

I can't do this, we're talking about automatic deployment in winPE here so no way to change that

[Andrii Y.]

Thanks for the update. However, my DHCP server sends them the DNS server to use. I can see this by opening a cmd prompt and using ipconfig /all to check configuration. It has the exact same addresses listed (except for the VM's ip address and MAC of course) as my own pc. However, I can ping the FQDN, the VM on the same machine can't. Another pc can ping the FQDN as well, while yet another couldn't a while ago. I'm not sure what is going on...

[Andrii Y.]

We are not talking about windows here, this is impossible especially considering we're talking automated OS deployment.