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Whenever I try to ping another box on my home network, it pings the wrong ip address:

C:\Users\Papa>ping macmini
Pinging macmini.belkin [] with 32 bytes of data: 
Reply from bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=110

As you can see it always appends belkin to anything I try to ping. So I hit up ipconfig and belkin happens to be Connection-specific DNS Suffix:

Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : belkin
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

My setup is all DHCP, so I am not sure where belkin is coming from. I looked through all the networking stuff, as you can see below: alt text

Bottom line: how do I fix this?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

That IP resolves to dnssearch.rr.com. Looks like a misconfiguration in that you are actually pinging a DNS search rather than using it...

The misconfiguration is more than likely present at your router than at your computer. Try changing the DNS servers the router is using to Google DNS at and

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You are absolutely right. It had belkin as the domain in the router config page. Which is really odd, as it's a linksys router. –  AngryHacker Dec 25 '10 at 1:33

To make sure you ping to correct host, you may use

ping <ip-address>

If you ping by using name (eg: macmini), it will refer to DNS service specified on your network. The DNS service will serve the request and return the IP address associated to the name you try to ping. If the DNS service doesn't return the expected IP-address, you may have to check the configuration of DNS service. This is another big topic.

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that's exactly the issue, it appends belkin. That is what I want to fix (big topic or not). –  AngryHacker Dec 25 '10 at 1:12
You need to go into your router's configuration and remove the DNS suffix. Sometimes this is simply called "Domain Name" too, but I would consult your router's documentation. –  vcsjones Dec 25 '10 at 1:31
@vcsjones You are right on the money. That resolved the issue. –  AngryHacker Dec 25 '10 at 1:34

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