We recently relocated a data center from one part of the country to another. Literally picked up all the equipment (most were VMWare guests) and dropped it into the new datacenter, and changed the routes. No IP addresses were changed as a part of the move, which is the only reason I even bring it up, as it was the last change before this behavior started happening.
After the move, I get inconsistent results when trying to access server shares on Server 2003 and Server 2008 boxes across the network. Specifically, I had one user demonstrate the problem for me:
- The user accessed \\server_name\share$\ and Explorer showed a single directory under the share
- The user then went to the address bar, changed the UNC to \\server_name.domain.local\share$\ and got all the directories he has access to
The "domain.local" is in the DNS search path as handed out by the DHCP server. I can ping both "server_name" and "server_name.domain.local" at the command prompt and get the IP address I expect. And all this worked before I moved datacenters, but again none of the IPs, DNS, etc changed as a part of the move, but I can't believe it's a coincidence, "The universe is rarely so lazy." :)
I am not running WINS, or if I am I cannot locate the WINS server.