extensionrenamewindowswindows-vista
Vista allows files with empty "first name" (for example, ".svn").
However, when I try to remove the filename of an existing file, leaving the prefix, in Explorer or using cmd's 'rename', I fail. How can I easily rename files to include the suffix only?
(I use Vista, if that matters).
On Windows, I use the excellent (and free) ReNamer tool.
Screenshot below demonstrates how to do your example operation with 2 simple Replace rules, but you can also use Regular Expressions if you want.
This sounds like name resolution is failing. Is the DNS server also set via DHCP? When you do the nslookup do you explicitly give the DNS server IP? There are issues with some name resolution servers because of the IPv6 stack on Vista so you could see if ping -4 works when ping does not (the Vista IP stack attempts name resolution using IPv6 first and then moves to IPv4 but some resolvers reject the subsequent IPv4 request: see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb878121.aspx for more information on this). I'm not a windows expert so my usual line of attack would be to look at the packets on the LAN, you might prefer to explore the windows side of things.
Best Answer
You can also do a file name that starts with a period, and has no extension. Try naming it ".whatever." (note the trailing period). This works in both Explorer and from the command line.