I'm facing a really strange and annoying problem with my network configuration. In my network we have a diverse list of OSs and servers. We are using Microsoft DNS server 6.1 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 and Apache 2.2 on a CentOS 6.4. I've setup a local virtual host on the Apache to be used by the company's personnel and in order the virtual host to be resolved on everyone's computer, I've asked our network admin to add an entry to the DNS server like x.local.
Having said that, when I open the web application on my own Ubuntu machine's browser, from time to time I have the problem of not getting responses from Apache. Once this problem starts, there will be no responses coming. Meanwhile if I run nslookup x.local it is resolved to the correct IP address. Yet since I suspected that it is a DNS problem, I added 192.168.1.20 x.local to my /etc/hosts file, once I did that responses started coming. I experienced the same behavior on two other PCs with Windows XP on them. Just to make you sure, there's no proxy set, what so ever, not on our browsers nor on our systems.
Right now I'm waiting for the problem to happen again so I can do more tests. Meanwhile if anyone has any suggestions I'll be really grateful.
