Hostnames and VPNs

[Brennan U.]

Hello all. I am new to the forums and have a question regarding a VPN. I am running a PPTP VPN server on my DDWRT router. I am connecting fine and all is well except for one problem. Occationally, if I try to access a network resource by the hostname (ex. \\desktop\Documents) I cannot access it. In addition I cannot ping the hostname. If I access the resource by the IP it works fine. I have also found that if place a period after the hostname (ex. \\desktop.\Documents) it works fine.

It seems strange as sometimes it works fine and sometimes I have to add a period. There doesnt seem to be any rhyme or reason. Does anyone have any suggestions, or possibly an explanation.

Thanks,

Brennan

[Sparda]

Do you have an internal DNS server?

[Brennan U.]

I do not believe so. I have a very basic setup with just the DDWRT router.

[Sparda]

Why do you expect it to work? ;)

But really, I wouldn't trust using hostnames on a network that doesn't have an actual DNS server. Admittedly the router will be running a DNS serve that attempts to keep track of hostnames, but it will be unreliable and can't know about any computers that has a static address. The other way that hostname lookup can work without a DNS server is NetBIOS, but that's even less reliable than a DNS server that gets all it's hostnames from the DHCP server. I wouldn't bother trying to use hostnames unless you explicitly need them, if you explicitly need them, you should look into setting up a proper DHCP and DNS server.