Hi Christian
To answer your question first the lease is 30 minutes, max lease is 2 hours and the problem still exits after the machine has been disconnected for 6 (overnight) (Ie it will happen again when the machine is powered up.
Firstly disregarding the involvement of the windows domain there are 2 questions raised by this
- Why does the same machine with one nic / mac address appear to be assocaited with 2 ip addresses simultaneously
- Why does the forward lookup on host name resolve to a different IP address then the one the machine has, perticualry when a revers record has been successfully created
Now coming back to the windows domain issue. The domain certainly has a dependancy on dns and I'm begining to suspect it actually has an impact on it too,
Let me explain the full details of what's happened leading up to this.
I'm switching from an old SuSE 11 server to a new Zentyal server, In fact it's the same machine I just have new set of hard drive with the zentyal build on them. I'll refer to them as if they are separate machines here for conveniece but they would never both be connected to the same network simultaneously
Both servers are configured in a similar manner. Both have the same names, both were windows file server / domain controllers and both had dhcp that dynamically updated the dns server.
Both handed out IP address in the same range (this is probably the important point). On the suse server the forward and revers records were added to the dns by the dhcp server. Both managed a windows domain of the same name
I had my old suse server running and the windows XP machine that is the source of the issue was connected to it. It had been leased an IP address by the suse server ending in
103. I dropped the XP machine off the old domain.
I powerd down the suse server and powered up the zentyal server. I then tried to connect the XP machine to the new domain. This resulted in the error "network path not found". At this point the XP machine still had the 103 address leased by the old suse server that was now powered down. The error occured because the zentyal dns server had no reverse dns entry for the XP machine and could not resolve the 103 address to the xp machines host name, since it had not leased that address out. This illustrates the dependancy on dns of the windows domain.
I executed an ipconfig /release followed by and ipconfig /renew on the XP machine and it was leased an IP address ending in
197. The reverse dns entry was created on the Zentyl server and this IP address successfully resolved to the XP machines host name. I then connected the XP machine to the domain successfully.
However having done this I made the following observersions
- Executing Ipconfig on the XP machine revealed that it's IP address was ending 197 as expected. It has no reference to the 103 address
- The 197 address correctly resolves to the host name of the xp machine
- A forward lookup of the XP machines host name resolves to the 103 address. This is true on all machines on the lan.
- A revers lookup of 103 address resloves to the XP machines host name
- No machine on the lan actually has the 103 address
- No machine shares the XP machines host name
- Two leases show up simultaneously on the dasboard for the XP machines MAC. one ends 197 the other ends 103. Both leases appear simultaneously when the XP machine is powered on and connected to the lan
- Both leases appear in /var/lib/dhcp/dhcp.leases
- The 197 address becomes unresolvable to a host name when the lease expires and the XP machine has been shut down.
- The XP machines host name stops resolving to the 103 address immediatly after the XP box is shut down
- The 103 address is permanatly resolvable to the XP machine name
- The 103 address appears in /var/lib/named db.x.x.x (where x.x.x are the other digits in the IP address range). Shutting down the name server, deleting the jnl file and removing it from this file does not fix the issue. Except in so much as 103 stops resolving to the host name. Once the XP machine is powered on a 103 address is added back in
- Dropping and renaming the XP machine has no effect on this problem. The same issue occures with the new host name
One final note on this. I believe I was once told that when a windows machine connects to a (conventional windows server run) windows domain that it updates the DNS records with it's host name / IP address. As supposed to the scenario I had on the suse box where the dhcp server did that. i wonder if there is some similar process in effect here as I know samba 4 has some dns support in order for it to perform in a manner expected by windows clients.