Debugging pinging of hosts

Rastikan

I thought I try my luck here.

I have a 50/50 situation where about half of the host can be pinged using the name displayed on the DHCP lease page (+ adding the .local suffix)
but the other half won't answer although the same hosts do answer back when using the IP address.

Is there concerns using "-" (dash) in the name? Actually I have again 50/50 host working with or without a dash in the name.

What can I do see what's happening with the name requests, why some to work and why other won't.

Thanks.

Rastikan

@Rastikan I think I figured out (at least partially) what to do to

In the DNS Resolver I need the following option active. I believe it was active at some point but wasn't right now.

DHCP Registration
Register DHCP leases in the DNS Resolver If this option is set, then machines that specify their hostname when requesting an IPv4 DHCP lease will be registered in the DNS Resolver so that their name can be resolved. Note that this will cause the Resolver to reload and flush its resolution cache whenever a DHCP lease is issued. The domain in System > General Setup should also be set to the proper value.

johnpoz

@Rastikan .local is a bad choice. This is the mdns domain, and why some of your boxes prob answered before is they answered to a mdns query which is just a multicast that a client sends out and asks hey everyone if this is your name answer.

I would suggest you use something other than local for your domain.. home.arpa is the recommended domain to use..

example.

$ ping nas.home.arpa

Pinging nas.home.arpa [192.168.9.10] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.9.10: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.9.10: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=64

If you have done a recent install of pfsense, this is what it would default too.

Registering dhcp can work, but it can also be problematic if you have a lot of devices, and your dhcp lease time is short..

I would suggest you setup dhcp reservations so your devices always get the same IP.. And then have it register those, this is a one time thing when unbound starts.