Secondly, I don't expect to get anything meaningful from nslookup because I don't have a DNS server.

 

Using nslookup both before and after tower.local in un-pingable gives:

 

$ nslookup tower.local

Server: 208.67.222.222

Address: 208.67.222.222#53

 

** server can't find tower.local: NXDOMAIN

 

$ nslookup tower

Server: 208.67.222.222

Address: 208.67.222.222#53

 

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: tower

Address: 67.215.65.132

 

In the second case, I clearly left the LAN because it's just some opendns host:

 

$ dig +short -x 67.215.65.132

hit-nxdomain.opendns.com.

@unevent Thanks for the info. I can't make heads or tails of what that link is saying. Care to translate for me?

 

@drawz I'm using a D-Link DIR-825, hardware version B, with firmware 2.07NA.

For the people who can resolve the by host name when the server is using dhcp, but not with it is static, this is expected behavior.  Your router is able to resolve the host name as long as the dhcp lease is active.

 

The following works for me using a DD-WRT router, but it may not work for everybody:

 

See if your router will allow you to assign a static DHCP address.  That's enough for DD-WRT to permanently resolve the host name.  Since you now know what IP would always be assigned to your nic by dhcp, you can go ahead and assign the address statically.

@drawz I'm using a D-Link DIR-825, hardware version B, with firmware 2.07NA.

You could put OpenWRT, Gargoyle, or DD-WRT firmware on that router and know that you have a reliable DNS/DHCP server. Also, you could consider letting your router be the primary DNS server for your local network. The router itself could be configured for OpenDNS or your ISP's DNS server, but this way you would keep the unRAID box in the local DNS lookup.

 

I have the DIR-835, running OpenWRT, and I have never had trouble accessing unRAID by hostname.

For the people who can resolve the by host name when the server is using dhcp, but not with it is static, this is expected behavior.  Your router is able to resolve the host name as long as the dhcp lease is active.

 

The following works for me using a DD-WRT router, but it may not work for everybody:

 

See if your router will allow you to assign a static DHCP address.  That's enough for DD-WRT to permanently resolve the host name.  Since you now know what IP would always be assigned to your nic by dhcp, you can go ahead and assign the address statically.

This is how I am set up, although the static DHCP address is not really relevant if your only goal is to access the server by hostname.

The way it works with a DIR-825 is that you can reserve IP addresses in the DHCP server's IP range for specific MAC addresses. This guarantees that when the DHCP server sees that MAC address it will give it that IP address. This does not guarantee that the router knows how to route traffic to that host. If you're not using a DNS server the host needs to broadcast its name for that to happen.

 

I appreciate the workarounds being suggested. I'll look into OpenWRT. I still think we should find the root cause however.

I'm noticing that I can connect to my server by its hostname ("tower.local") when the server is started, but after "a while" (usually no longer than 30 minutes) the hostname is no longer resolvable. I can still connect by IP.

 

Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

 

I'd like to continue to used DHCP for IP assignment and not resort to hacking my hosts file. This should be something that works without resorting to those kind shenanigans

 

This is my first unRAID build. I'm running 5.0 rc-16.

 

Interesting.  What browser are you using? Reason I ask is that I've had the same thing start happening to me with chrome after the latest update to my nexus 4, but if I use Firefox from the same phone them it works fine using the hostname in the URL.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

Sorry for the delay.

 

This is happening with any browser. The browser doesn't matter though. I can't even ping tower.local from the command line.