Back in July I wrote about these errors and how they were happening because the DNS zones were not configured properly on one of our servers. Well, today I was reviewing the event log on a desktop PC and I just happened to notice a resurgence of the errors. After all being quiet for the past two and a half months, this PC just last week started to register the same errors all over again.
For this particular PC it is very aggravating because, in the holidays, I had planned to use it to check out a problem with another PC, which I’ll mention below in a minute. Now, well I have to try to figure out this big problem first before I can get onto solving that other very important issue.
Regardless of the work I have done to try to have the network functioning smoothly we still have regular occurrences of reverse DNS lookups failing. An example is trying to do a remote login to a system. When you enter the name of the remote system Windows does a reverse lookup for the IP address. Then you can get the message that the remote system cannot be found, even though you know that is not true. You get the IP address of that machine and type that into MSTSC instead, and it works. You check the reverse lookup zone entry for that machine and it has the wrong IP address in there. So you know why the reverse lookup failed, but you don’t know why DNS has not updated it.
The problem I’m having on another PC is a history of MrxSmb error events logged. These errors occur as a result of the PC dropping its network connection or dropping packets and result in a myriad of popup errors telling the user that data from an open file has been lost. As it happens, this PC is the computer technician’s own work PC 🙂 . The errors have come up continuously for all the time I can really remember having this PC. I don’t recall seeing them on any other type of PC, but I do remember seeing them on another PC of the same type. I have tried the onboard network card as well as two PCI cards, all different brands, with no change in the outcomes. No other event logs (on other PCs) show this error. There has to be something screwy with the hardware in this non-Intel-CPU non-Intel-chipset system. This particular computer has logged over 150 of these errors in the past five weeks. The problem is that they are quite random. The actual number of days on which they occurred is only seven, and the last actual instance when this problem occurred was two weeks ago. So I would have to do at least a month’s testing to be sure that it really was a hardware problem like that.
It turns out that my PC has also registered a DNSApi entry, but it was for error 11197 instead and happened three weeks ago. If there is a pattern happening, it is that many of these PCs that have given the error messages are ones that are not turned on every day.