When I run "ping -a ipaddress " on a Windows 2003 server against a machine that has Windows 7, occasionally I will get bad results. We have about 20 Win7 machines and each of them have had this problem from time to time. Rebooting the Win7 machine will correct the bad output from "ping -a". When I say bad output, I mean that the hostname returned is not the computer name as expected. Instead the It returns the domain name (Ex. domain = ihda.org, returned results are IHDA) All of our Windows 7 PCs return IHDA from time to time. I have looked all over DNS and see no issues with it that would cause these kind of results. As mentioned before, once I reboot the trouble PC, I receive the correct hostname. Example: C:\>ping -a 10.0.7.85 Pinging IHDA [10.0.7.85] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 10.0.7.85: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.0.7.85: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.0.7.85: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.0.7.85: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128 Ping statistics for 10.0.7.85: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms In the above example, IHDA should say C1157. As mentioned all Windows 7 PCs will return IHDA from time to time until rebooted. Any help would be great.

I'd check the DNS settings on the Win7 clients, specifically the DNS suffix settings.

Ping -a will return information that is stored in the "Reverse Lookup" zone. Check those records. It could be that the clients are not updating the records when they change their IPs.Visit: anITKB.com, an IT Knowledge Base.

We do not have reverse lookup zones configured in DNS. This does not appear to be a DNS issue since once we reboot the problem machines they begin reporting correctly. Of course right now all my win7 client are reporting correctly so I am unable to do any testing till it occurs again.

Do you happen to have a WINS infrastructure on the network?Visit: anITKB.com, an IT Knowledge Base.

No WINS either. Strictly DNS with a forward lookup zone. I configured the Reverse Lookup Zone last week so hopefully the problem does not resurface. So far so good. I also had to create a GPO that would turn on the ability to update DNS for Windows 7. None of them showed up in the Reverse Lookup Zone until I turned on that capability. It is interesting that this only affected my Windows 7 PCs. The Windows XP boxes never gave us problems.