Why can I not view/use/map a drive from a machine using its short hostname if the short hostname is proven resolvable by DNS?
I have a machine (the client in this example) running Windows Server 2008r2 Standard.
I cannot view, use, or map network drives from my fileserver onto this machines, using the short hostname.
I can do all that, eg net view myfileserver.example.com
if I use the fully qualified domain name as shown, or if use the IP address.
I can ping the machine using the short name, and nslookup returns the proper IP address if I use the short name.
I could map a network drive on a machine in another domain using either the FQDN or the short name, eg: net use \\otherfileserver\IPC$ /u:"otherdomain\mylogin" "mypassword" /persistent:no
A real head scratcher (to me).
Note also that many other client machines are mapping network drives from the same fileserver.
EDIT: Ok, I awarded the bounty to Sum1sAdmin. I think he was on to something with the whole Browser thing. The problem is not DNS, no way no how it could be. Shortnames, longnames, skinny names, fat names, fully qualified names- they were all resolvable. It was NetBios (props to Noor Khaldi for being the first to bring it up, btw).
But it was Sum1sAdmin that pushed me to look at browsing in general. And because of that, I found that I had two Linux machines that were acting as the Masters for my domain. That was not good, because I have a mixed Linux/Windows environment and as it says in the smb.conf file: "Domain Master specifies Samba to be the Domain Master Browser...Don't use this if you already have a Windows NT domain controller doing this job..." which I do. In any event, I don't trust Samba to play well with Windows. If I can't call Microsoft Tech Support and say, "Yeah I have this browsing issue and by the way the master is a CentOS 5.3 machine running Samba," and they say, "Ok, cool!" then I'm not comfortable. I want my Windows-y things to live in Windows, and Linux be the client- only.
That said, I removed Samba's ability to be the domain master. This totally broke my browsing and made any net view
command return an error 53, "The network path was not found." on all hosts for a while. Then after a while I got a new error instead: system error 6118, "The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available." Waiting further, I suddenly started to see some machines. Using Scottie's handy dandy script (http://scottiestech.info/2009/02/14/how-to-determine-the-master-browser-in-a-windows-workgroup/), I then started to see machines and new Windows masters.
All that said, the original machine is still broken. And now, some 10 minutes later, my domain has again broke with system error 6118. If you check my conversation with Sum1sAdmin, you will see that my domain is kind of screwy. This is good, because now I know that the issue was never just random. If it's broke, and I know where it's broke, I can fix it. And right now NetBios is all kinds of broke because it was never set up correctly in the first place, which started with me figuring out that Linux was involved. (Which actually may not have caused a problem but regardless, I want to remove that wildcard from the environment and let Windows be Windows).
Anyway, thanks for all the responses. I'm going to keep futzing with this system until it works.