broken resolver after uninstall for upgrade to firstspot4

[steve123]

After uinstalling FS3 (in prep for upgrade to FS4) I determined that the built-in windows server 2003 resolver is broken. For example, "ping localhost" fails with an error (yes, localhost is in the hosts file). However ping 127.0.0.1 works. Ping www.google.com fails, but if I look up an IP for google and ping by IP, it works. All apps that use the built-in resolver do not work on the server: Internet Explorer, telnet, ping, etc. However, because nslookup has its own resolver, I can use nslookup to resolve names.

I have tried uninstall/reinstall service packs, ipconfig int ip reset, ipconfig winsock reset, disable/re-enable adapters, repair adapter, reset dnsclient service, to no avail. I tried numerous searches on this forum, google, etc, but could not find anyone having a similar experience. I also tried lspfix but it did not detect any problems.

To summarize, the built-in "resolver" (the entity that converts hostnames to IPs) broke after uinstalling FS3 in windows server standard 2003. I currently am in the process of reinstalling the operating system to get past this, obviously not really happy with patronsoft right now.

[steve123]

just to be clear this is NOT a DNS problem. Windows does not use DNS to look up its own host name, nor does it use DNS to look up 'localhost' (refer to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/evaluate/technol/tcpipfund/tcpipfund_ch07.mspx , go to the section titled 'Windows Methods of Resolving Host Names' ). This is not a firewall problem, ICS is not on. RRAS was off, I turned it on to see if that made a difference.

[alan]

Please check out http://www.patronsoft.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=811
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~ Patronsoft Limited ~

[steve123]

Regarding the previous "helpful" link:

The problem was not related to DNS nor active directory -- this was a stand-alone server, not in a domain at all The problem was not the DNS domain name, again, name resolution of the local hostname and 'localhost' both failed. This problem began when I uninstalled FS v3 in prep for version 4 -- it was not the result of installing, but uninstalling.

Anyway, full reinstall of Windows fixed it and everything is back up, it just took a lot longer than I had. The server had run FS3 without incident for nearly 2 years, the only problem that we had up until this point was that FS3 would not start automatically upon reboot despite every attempt to make this happen.