Hi
I have a question that may be just too simplistic for this forum, but bear with me while I explain
Recently I helped an old friend to "refurbish" his small business network. I replaced a Novell server with a Windows 2012 server, 6 novell XP clients with new W7 clients and some other stuff (router, vpn, wireless, printer). All is operational and works well.
His companys website is hosted externally. It's called "www.the-company.se" and is accessible from anywhere.
The internal AD domain i created is also called "the-company.se" with "thecomp" as short netbios name. Again, all works well and the clients access applications and data from shares on the server. Users log in with "username@the-company.se" or "thecomp\username".
The new router, a Netgear VPN router/firewall is running the DHCP service. The WIndows server is running the DNS service. DHCP clients are configured with two DNS entries, 10.0.2.6 as primary (the windows server) and 8.8.8.8 (google dns) as secondary dns. Again all internet access as well as intranet access works fine, except one thing.
When internal clients asks for "http://www.the-company.se" in the URL field, they are sent by IE to BING where the first listed entry is to the external site. Clicking on that entry (which hovering the cursor over says "www.the-company.se") returns a blank IE page saying that it could not connect to the site.
The external site is also using the domain "the-company.com", and using http://www.the-company.com instead of .se in the IE URL field works at it should.
I can also add that using Google Chrome instead of IE also solves the problem!
All this make me believe that there is something missing in the DNS configiration, and that IE and AD is too integrated for their own good. I did try to add an A record in the DNS management tool. I set "www" to the external IP and reloaded the zone. That did not help. Then I added the IP and www.the-company.se to the local hosts file on the server, and now it works again.
I have tried to explain the issue as simple as I can, but if there is anything that I forgot to write, please feel free to ask. I would very much appreciate to learn what I have done wrong or failed to look at.
Best regards
Anders