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We have an internal website run on a server on our LAN. The intranet site is available by browsing to either of these:

http://computername
http://computername.company.com

(the latter is manually-added DNS entry).

When connected via VPN, the computername version doesn't work, only the full DNS URL does. Why the difference? Is this a VPN setting or something wrong with the DNS server?

Network domain is Active Directory, server is running IIS, VPN is OpenVPN.

user154364
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  • Does your VPN server dole out IP addresses from your primary DHCP, or from its own internal pool? To echo @Mathias below, an internal DHCP might not be putting the correct DNS suffix on the end of the VPN client's virtual NIC (so you are actually querying `computername.vpn-users-local-lan.local` instead. Adding the correct DHCP options to the VPN server's address pool, and prioritising the VPN client's virtual NIC over the user's physical adapter might do the trick. – jimbobmcgee Jan 14 '13 at 17:54

1 Answers1

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You might be able to resolve the address using only the computername, when on the internal network, because of NetBT. You might get another IP address assigned when you come through the VPN. NetBIOS name resolution works by broadcasting a name resolution request, and thus, only works within a subnet

Another options for single label name resolution, if you aldready have records in DNS for the FQDN, would be to add company.com to your clients' DNS Suffix Search List. This way, your client will try to resolve computername as computername.company.com if it cannot resolve it with NetBT or WINS

Mathias R. Jessen
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