I’ve been working on setting up a Microsoft Project server at my job. I assigned the server a static IP address (I need to ask why we do this, because I don’t really know…) and my client machine was unable to contact the server. I could ping the IP address directly, but it wasn’t resolving the name through DNS. This was only true for some clients; namely those with one of our HP switches as a default gateway. I went to the switch’s web managed portal to see what was going on, but couldn’t find a test to test the DNS Connection from the switch to the server. It could ping the server’s IP address fine, but I knew that from the getgo because I could ping the server by IP from my desk client.
Looking at an outdated IP address roster (the compilation of which was my first task here, over a year ago now), I noticed that all the addresses from 192.168.2.50-192.168.2.150 were assigned by DHCP. I had thought adam told me to use .53 because this was available. I noticed that the chart was out of date, so I found the updated version and noticed that there were static IP addresses up to about the 50 range. Still, I figured it was worth a shot and moved the project server from 192.168.2.53 to 192.168.2.35. Still, no luck. In exasperation, I renamed the server from project to “jengajam”. For some reason, that did the trick. I renamed it back to “project” and the connection still worked.
My guess is that the switch was caching DNS values or something screwy. Who knows? In any case, working on problems like this is my favorite part of this job.