help - no DNS entry

[Peter Murray]

"DNS" is an acronym for "Domain Name Service".  TCP/IP (and consequently the
Internet) is made up of connection between a bunch of numbers (called an IP
address; like "129.22.138.1") and DNS provides (among other things) a mapping
of human-rememberable names to these numbers.  For instance, people send mail
to you at a machine called email.mesd.k12.or.us, but machine actually has the
address "198.236.66.3", and any machine sending your machine mail must
translate the name to the address in order to find your machine on the
network.  The same sort of thing happens in the web:  "www.cwru.edu" is
translated to an IP address by the DNS, which the browser then uses to
connnect to our web server.

The error message you are seeing is cause by the DNS server finding no
mapping between the name you typed in the URL and an IP address out there on
the Internet.  This can happen if you mis-type the URL, or by problems in the
DNS.  It is difficult to tell without some examples, and I'd suggest trying
to chat with your network specialists.  Or, send me an e-mail message with
some examples and I can at least determine whether the DNS considers them
valid machine names...

Good luck!


Peter

On Mon, 9 Jun 1997 16:50:16 -0700 mary_bush at email.mesd.k12.or.us (Mary Bush)
wrote:

> Can anybody tell me what it means when there are repeat "no DNS" entries -
> not just a couple of busy, unavailable URL's,  but 15 in a row?  The "no
> DNS"
> responses seem to come immediately, as if Netscape hasn't even gone
> looking, and each successive attempt at another URL brings the same
> immediate response.  It happens at all times of day.  Could this be a
> problem
> with our server?
> A number of people within our building and on our Network, have
> experienced this during the last couple of weeks.
> I'm running Netscape 3.0, Windows 95.  Our LAN is on a Novell server, and
> our web servers are Windows NT.

--
Peter Murray, Library Systems Manager                      pem at po.cwru.edu
Digital Media Services                   http://www.cwru.edu/home/pem.html
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio            W:216-368-5888