Ping Request Could Not Find Host
Mark Berry September 20, 2009
Occasionally on my Windows XP Pro SP3 machine, Outlook 2007 SP2 will tell me that it has had an error receiving POP mail from my SBS 2003 server, which resides on the same network.
I started a command prompt and typed “ping myserver.mydomain.local”. Sure enough, I get back the message “Ping request could not find host myserver.mydomain.local. Please check the name and try again.”
An nslookup works fine, so I know the SBS server is there and is responding to DNS requests.
In fact, I can “ping myserver” without problems. But for some reason, pinging the fully-qualified internal name doesn’t work.
Sometimes, I can just type “ipconfig /flushdns” to clear this up. Today that didn’t work. However once I actually stopped and started the DNS cache, ping started working and so did email:
net stop DNScache
net start DNScache
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C:\>net stop DNScache
System error 5 has occurred.
Access is denied.
C:\>
You’ll need admin privileges to stop and start a service. On XP, you can use a command like this:
runas /noprofile /env /user:Administrator cmd
You will be prompted for the Administrator password, and a new command window will open.