Issues resolving local domain name with Windows 7

We have subdomain entries in our local DNS server which we use for web development. The IP’s they point to our bound to web sites.

For Example:
FarmA.webstaging = 10.1.10.10
FarmB.webstaging = 10.1.10.11

The domain name entries have been setup for many years now and work fine with XP and Server 2003 systems.

Now that we are rolling Windows 7 into our environment we are having issues with these entries. You cannot browse or ping the names, but if I use nslookup I do receive the correct IP address.

When you ping the FQDN (e.g. FarmA.webstaging.ourdomain.com) the name resolves as expected. Checking the DHCP information I received I have a primary DNS Suffix of ourdomain.com and ourdomain.com is listed in DNS suffix search list. So I should not need to include the domain name.

If I add entries into the hosts file, I am able to browse and ping the name, it resolves correctly.

What I would like to find out is why this is happening and if there is a way to correct this issue without having to add hosts file entries to each windows 7 machine. (I have not tried Windows Server 2008 yet).

Update:
What I have noticed is that the name will resolve using nslookup.

nslookup FarmA.webstaging 

works fine in resolving the ip address; ping cannot resolve.
I have noticed in the past that ping and nslookup seem to resolve addresses differently, something I have not been able to discover why.
I

I ran into this problem. Unfortunately, the solution isn’t as obvious as fixing the DNS suffix!

See this article for a complete explanation and the solution:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/networking/archive/2009/04/16/dns-client-name-resolution-behavior-in-windows-vista-vs-windows-xp.aspx

TL;DR:

Windows 7 has a rule change compared to Windows XP when it comes to how the DNS resolver treats multi-level names: By default, Win7 will NOT append your DNS suffix to multi-level names, whereas Win XP did. This means that in Win7, FarmA.webstaging will not work, but webstaging by itself will work, as will FarmA.webstaging.yourcompany.com (i.e. the FQDN).

To fix: open up group policy editor and browse to:

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> DNS Client -> “Allow DNS Suffix Appending to Unqualified Multi-Label Name Queries”

Set this to “Enabled” and restart your browser; it should fix the problem.

Check more discussion of this question.

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