Question : NSlookups are returning the same IP address no matter what  adress I look up

Hello Folks.

I have been having problems with my DNS server. Yesterday I created the revers lookup zone (8.168.192.in-addr.arpa) and solved most problems. Thhe only things left are as follows. no matter what address I do an NSlookup on i get the external IP for my domain as an answer. So as an example lets say that my external IP is 66.82.46.213 (Note: this is not my real IP this is just for the sakes of the example.) When I do an NSlookup on www.dell.com I get the following reply:

Server: mydnsserver.subdomain.mydomain.com
Address: 192.168.8.25

Non-Authoritative answer:
Name: www.dell.com.mydomain.com
Address: 66.82.46.213

The next problem is that in the Microsoft DNS in my windows 2003 server I am failing the simple query test under the monitoring tab when looking at the properties of my dns server in the DNS mamager.

The server has itself as a primary DNS in the connection settings. and the back up server as the secondary. The server uses forwarders to allow queries to external domains. A few more tidbits fo info that I hope will be helpful. I can ping www.dell.com and I get a ture IP address with 4 sucessful replies. please see the example belos. I can ping anything and get the real IP address and sucessful replies.

Pinging www1.ins.dell.com [143.166.83.38] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 143.166.83.38 bytes=32 time=152ms TTL=241
Reply from 143.166.83.38 bytes=32 time=173ms TTL=241
Reply from 143.166.83.38 bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=241
Reply from 143.166.83.38 bytes=32 time=115ms TTL=241

Now the next tid bit of info is that doing an nslookup on any of my internal machines yields a correct internal IP address.

Server: mydnsserver.subdomain.mydomain.com
Address: 192.168.8.25

Name: myserver.subdomain.mydomain.com
Address: 192.168.8.36

Any help would be greatly appreciated in figuring out why external nslookups alwasy yield my external IP and why I am failing the simple query test.


Thanks

Answer : NSlookups are returning the same IP address no matter what  adress I look up

In nslookup you can use

nslookup
www.dell.com.
quit

(the final period is important, otherwise if you have extra dns suffixes setup in tcpip settings it will do as you have found).

Therer is a MS document which eludes me at the moment that describes this process.

Steve