[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#626529: base: Communicating with certain special windows Active Directory domain names fails

[Lawrence]

Package: base
Severity: important

This Debian Squeeze server is located inside a Windows network, and it's DNS servers in resolv.conf are set to Domain Controllers which are also DNS servers.

In this setup, a DNS lookup for gc._msdcs.<domain> correctly returns the IP addresses of the Global Catalog servers on the network.

When trying to communicate via these special DNS names however, things do not work.

For example:

ping gc._msdcs.<domain>

returns unknown host.

Also, trying to communicate using the ldap protocol using the same DNS name does not work.

As soon as I use just ping <domain> or ldap to just <domain> (which returns all DNS servers in the domain), it works fine. This works for us, but only because all our DCs are also GCs adn DNS servers.

I checked and re-checked, and nslookup gc._msdcs.<domain> always returns the correct results.

I've also checked using both ping and ldap on a windows machine and that works perfectly using gc._msdcs.<domain>.

Lastly, I've tried the same tests on another Debain Squeeze server and the results fail in exacatly the same manner as this one.

I wonder if it's something to do with the underscore?

Thanks - Lawrence

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash