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Ideas why local DNS fails with specialized software

PliotronX

PliotronX

Diamond Member
I first noticed this phenomenon with software such as Sage Masterbuilder and Maxwell Estimation where mapping the requisite network drive using the IP rather than the hostname of the server is more stable, encounters less errors and timeouts. This is within two different companies and locations, very small with simple LAN's. No errors indicate any dropped packets, there is no way the networks are saturated to a point that DNS traffic is constricted.

As a result, I have since always mapped drives and even printers by IP and I see a lot less complaints this way. I cannot get my coworkers to do the same however, so I end up cleaning up their messes.

Anyway, the latest example is within a fairly large corporation with AutoCAD and Flexnet. Now it is possible there are transient TTL issues and whatnot at this company as they are in three different states with MPLS goodness and latencies vary from 40ms to 300-600ms. So I get a call about AutoCAD complaining about the license server, remote on, see that he was told to use the hostname of the license server which is located one state away. I punch in the IP of the license server and boom.

Why is DNS so finicky??
 
I'm not sure it is DNS being finicky as much as it is Sage and other programs having trouble with UNC paths. I've had changing the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order\ProviderOrder to be the same on both the server and the client work before. Though I'm not sure if that was the change that really fixed my issue or if it was a combination of things.

My experience was with Sage Timberline. For Peachtree I had always mapped a drive locally.
 
Unless I am misunderstanding what you are talking about, it has nothing to do with DNS. DNS is an IP related thing. What you are looking at is an SMB/NetBIOS/LLDP (UPnP in some cases too) issue. The host name has nothing to do with DNS in this case.

It is the device advertising their services on the local network. This will allow other devices to resolve a host name to an IP address.

This also doesn't always work great because of master browser issues with older versions of SMB and especially with NetBIOS (I don't believe the same discovery issues are normally present if you disable NetBIOS and utilize only LLDP, but I could be wrong about that. I don't play with it much, but I do only use LLDP on my LAN).

Oh and NetBIOS and LLDP are used for more than SMB/network drives, but you had specifically called out mapped network drive host name resolution as an issue.
 
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