Windows – DNS Fault – missing entries

I ran into this problem. Unfortunately, the solution isn't as obvious as fixing the DNS suffix!

See this article for a complete explanation and the solution: http://blogs.technet.com/b/networking/archive/2009/04/16/dns-client-name-resolution-behavior-in-windows-vista-vs-windows-xp.aspx

TL;DR:

Windows 7 has a rule change compared to Windows XP when it comes to how the DNS resolver treats multi-level names: By default, Win7 will NOT append your DNS suffix to multi-level names, whereas Win XP did. This means that in Win7, FarmA.webstaging will not work, but webstaging by itself will work, as will FarmA.webstaging.yourcompany.com (i.e. the FQDN).

To fix: open up group policy editor and browse to:

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> DNS Client -> “Allow DNS Suffix Appending to Unqualified Multi-Label Name Queries”

Set this to "Enabled" and restart your browser; it should fix the problem.

You should usually test these things with the FQDN, rather than just the hostname, to rule out suffix list problems on the testing computer.

That said, you need to make sure of a few things.

Normally only computers that are in the domain are allowed to update DNS records in it; check that it's properly domain-joined (a domain user can authenticate on it and access domain resources, and domain administrators have admin rights on it).

If that isn't it, you should ensure that the permissions on the DNS zone allow computer accounts to update it. If you've locked it down tightly, it's possible that the computer isn't being allowed to register itself because of policy.

Failing that, you should read microsoft's documentation regarding how this process worked (it's still largely the same as it was when the document was written): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816592

Troubleshoot that process. Make sure that your workstation can actually talk to an authoritative DNS server for the zone, and preferably the one that comes up when you query the SOA record (to use nslookup for this issue type=SOA and then query the domain name).