Men & Mice Community

Good Morning,
Quick question which hopefully yields a quick response!

This morning we realized that our computer's dns requests are not automatically being pushed to an external dns server.

For example, lets assume that our domain is called "schooldomain.edu"
A user can access "mail.schooldomain.edu" (our internal email server)
but cannot access "www.apple.com"

Up until this point we have had our DHCP server distributing our internal dns ip address as well as the external dns address, so we haven't realized that our dns server may not be setup correctly.

I guess the question is where, in the management console, would one configure the external dns settings?

Thanks very much!!!!
Andrew

If you need your server to forward queries to another server, you can set that up in the server's options window.

However, often when people think they need to use forwarding, they would be better off not doing so. The server is fully capable of looking up names on its own. I can't give specific advice in this case without knowing quite a bit more about the environment.

Chris,
First, I am amazed at your broad spectrum of knowledge regarding DNS!

Basically, our problem is that any external url that a user enters in his or her web browser is not getting through to the internet, unless our DHCP server assigns an external DNS server to that user. Internal addresses function properly.

Our internal DNS address is: 160.79.43.2
Our ISP's dNS server is 160.79.6.130 and 160.79.5.130

The external DNS addresses: "160.79.6.130" and "160.79.5.130" do not appear in our Men and Mice Configuration... shouldn't they?

Thanks again
Andrew

AndrewGillies wrote:

Chris,
First, I am amazed at your broad spectrum of knowledge regarding DNS!

Well, I do teach classes on the subject.

AndrewGillies wrote:

Basically, our problem is that any external url that a user enters in his or her web browser is not getting through to the internet, unless our DHCP server assigns an external DNS server to that user. Internal addresses function properly.

This tells me that your name server is not able (or not willing) to resolve names out on the Internet. Why might that be?

Check the server's log. If you don't see anything regarding queries, check the logging settings in the server's options window - for the Men & Mice Suite Log channel, turn on all categories except "Lame servers", and set the severity threshold to "Info".

AndrewGillies wrote:

Our internal DNS address is: 160.79.43.2
Our ISP's dNS server is 160.79.6.130 and 160.79.5.130

The external DNS addresses: "160.79.6.130" and "160.79.5.130" do not appear in our Men and Mice Configuration... shouldn't they?

Not necessarily. But if you find you do need to put them into the configuration, open the server's options window and, in the first panel, turn on forwarding. Enter these two servers as forwarders.

Chris, are the instructions the same when using the management console through wine?

AndrewGillies wrote:

Chris, are the instructions the same when using the management console through wine?

Yes. Why wouldn't they be?

Wine is just an API layer and graphics library to allow Windows applications to run natively on some other operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, even Solaris/x86). It doesn't change the way the application works.

Chris, Good Point regarding the use of Wine... we rarely change anything on our DNS, so I thought I would ask just in case.

Anyway, I went ahead and enabled the setting you suggested here:

But if you find you do need to put them into the configuration, open the server's options window and, in the first panel, turn on forwarding. Enter these two servers as forwarders.
Chris Buxton
Men & Mice

I'm assuming then, if I set the user's ip settings manually and assign only our internal dns, because I've enabled forwarding on the Men and Mice DNS, any web address requests should be sent to both our internal DNS and the external DNS. Unfortunately this is still not the case. With only the internal DNS assigned to the user, their machine is unable to access the internet. If I assign both DNS ip addresses or just the external one, web requests function properly.

Any ideas as to what can be causing this to still not work?
I know that this is a really open ended question, but we're looking for different areas to explorer)

Thanks again
Andrew

Check the Query Restrictions panel of the server's options window. What is the ACL there?

Chris,
There are no Query Restrictions listed (nor transfer restrictions)
-Andrew

At this point, we need to see your system in order to diagnose it. If you want us to look at it, please send ssh login details to support@menandmice.com.