I have a mix of apple and windows.  I made the mod to the apple so I can access the web interface of the unraid server.  WHen I first installed my server, the windows machines accessed it no problem.  Out of the blue I cannot access it by name, only IP.  I have set a static ip.  My dlink router is the dns server for the lan.  here are the network setting

Tower IP=192.168.2.97

sm-255.255.255.0

default=192.168.2.1

dns=192.168.2.1

 

I can ping it and access the server via ip.  I cannot ping it or access the web interface by name.  I have rebooted my router and the unraid server with no luck.  It seems as though the unraid server is not registering it self with dns.  I am looking for some ideas on what to check to see why it is not registering with dns.  In windows I can flushdns and tell it to registerdns but a reboot will do the same thing.  The unraid server has not registered itself with the router upon reboot.

 

Thanks

 

That router is almost certainly acting as a DNS proxy to your ISPs DNS servers.  Your unRAID server should be resolving via NETBIOS over TCIP, not DNS, and it is either not responding to NETBIOS requests, or the Windows machine is not seeing the unRAID server's NETBIOS broadcasts.

 

There is some more info here with info on how to configure a hosts file if nothing else works.

Yep more or what he said. Here is Windows, Linux and Mac

http://practice.chatserve.com/hosts.html

You are absolutely correct.  I finally figured out the config problem was with my router.  In the router it was configured  to relay dns requests to my isp's dns servers.  I unchecked this and all is well.  The only thing I am not positive about is how this got configured this way?  This basically happened out of the blue.  I am looking into possible security violations of the router.

 

Thanks for the help

That is typically the default setting in most consumer routers these days.  To resolve IP addresses from hostnames on the Internet, your devices must be able to contact a DNS server; usually a DNS server supplied by your ISP for home connections.  The reason most routers act as a proxy is so you don't have to keep up with what IP addresses your ISP is assigning to their DNS servers, you just send DNS requests to your router and it handles the rest.  In most cases, the router gets the ISP DNS servers through DHCP.  If you are not using DHCP, you would need to manually enter the ISP supplied DNS servers IP addresses in the router, then if they ever change you would only need to update the settings in the router, not every device on the network.

 

The misconception I have been seeing here on the boards over the past few days is that DNS is used for name resolution on your internal network.  Unless you have manually configured a DNS server, this is NOT the case.  Local name resolution is happening via NETBIOS over TCP/IP for 99.9999% of Windows based home networks.  This is a distributed protocol that relies on network broadcasts, not a centralized location for holding hostname to IP address lookups.  Apple may be using something else, but I've never dealt with Apple networking so I don't know what they may be using.

 

Glad your problem is resolved though, that's what matters the most