My problem in short:
Entering http://app01:8084/
into the browser does not find my server.
Entering http://app01.my.domain.com:8084/
does work.
With the localname Wireshark not even captures a DNS request. nslookup can look up "app01" correctly.
The details:
(Windows 7 Ult. 64, VirtualBox 4.3.10, VMWare Workstation 10.0.2)
I have a virtual machine in VirtualBox which contains a rails app. Port forwardings have been set up as localhost:8084 -> vm:80, 8184 -> 443 and 2242 -> 22. I have a Mac OS X Mavericks server (OS X Server) which also is a name server. The nameserver has entries for my workstation like so:
w7ult64.my.domain.com -> 192.168.1.115
Aliases have been added, among others "name1", "app01".
(I added "name1" months ago and URLs like http://name1:8084/
work well.)
Now I added the app01 alias and it does not work.
I started the browser.
I started WireShark to capture all network interfaces.
I enter http://app01:8084/
into the browser and it starts spinning its wheels.
I look at the Wireshark capture and there is not a single DNS lookup.
I run nslookup from commandline. app01 is resolved perfectly and I see the appropriate lookups in the wireshark capture.
The network interfaces have "my.domain.com" as the dns suffix. ("my.domain.com" only in this discussion - the actual domain is one which I own.)
So I am a little confused why the browser is not able to do, what nslookup can do.
Looking at the wireshark capture, I noticed that when the browser tries to find app01, there are a lot of retransmission entries on a certain network. That network is from virtualbox ("VirtualBox Host-Only Network #5) which is used as a host only network in that actual VM on adapter 2.
What can I do to fix this?
(I also noticed this: After I start the workstation, Opera and Chrome take a lot of seconds (20?) to reach an external website. Firefox brings it up immediately. Somehow I suspect that there might be differences in how these browsers do DNS lookups?)