DNS = FUN

Two domains involved here.

Mydomain.com

theirdomain.com

mydomain.com has a secondary zone for theirdomain.com and vice versa.

Issue: If I do ping -a 10.100.19.26 or nslookup 10.100.19.26  ( theirserver.theirdomain.com ) from mydesktop.mydomain.com it returns

theirserver.mydomain.com

If I ping theirserver.mydomain.com it does not resolve because the record doesn't exist on mydomain.com . I can ping theirserver.theirdomain.com . From theirdesktop.theirdomain.com I can ping -a 10.100.19.26 and it comes back theirserver.theirdomain.com

I've checked our reverse DNS zone and there are no PTR records for theirserver.mydomain.com. Our reverse lookup zone does use WINS-R but there are no WINS records that match that server name or IP.

This same situation seems to occur on any machine in theirdomain.com . Where else can mydomain.com DNS be pulling this info from? We have a trust with theirdomain.com but I don't know of any reason that would affect DNS. I even checked out theirdomain.com DNS reverse lookup and forward lookup zones and there are no records that match theirserver.mydomain.com. The TCP/IP settings are the standard setup on theirserver.theirdomain.com, the DNS tab it has the Append primary and connection specific DNS suffixes with the box checked for Append parent suffixes of the primary DNS suffix. If I understand those settings correctly they should not affect this either.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Solution

A very smart friend of mine pointed out that DNS maps the authority of  a reverse look-up to the owners of the IP. Our reverse lookup zone does contain the IP of theirdomain.com . Even though there were no records in it, reverse lookups were resolving and defaulting to mydomain.com. I can manually create PTR records for the IP and assign it the theirserver.theirdomain.com name and BOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE! Nslookup and ping -a resolve correctly after an IPCONFIG -flushdns and IPCONFIG -registerdns on my local machine.