Name Resolution in Windows guest does not work

Hi,

I'm running PD 4.0.3848 with Windows XP as a guest OS. Suddenly, the network in the guest OS stopped working. Unfortunatly, I don't remember when it actually happened, but I suspect it was after the last PD upgrade (but I'm not 100% sure about that).
I'm running with the default network settings in PD, using Shared Network. The guest OS IP settings look ok, I can ping Google servers from within the guest. The only thing that does not work is the name resolution (DNS). Shoudn't PD proxy/forward DNS queries from the guest OS to the ones the host OS is using?

I already tried to (completely) remove and reinstall PD but that didn't help.

Any ideas what could be wrong? Are there any known issues with this PD version?

--
Here's the network config in the guest OS:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>ipconfig /all

Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : xyzae31
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 3:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Parallels Ethernet Adapter #2
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-1C-42-8F-84-AC
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.211.55.3
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.211.55.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.211.55.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.211.55.1
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Freitag, 27. November 2009 10:30:56
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Freitag, 4. Dezember 2009 10:30:56

--
Trying to resolve google.com from within the guest OS:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>nslookup google.com
*** Can't find server name for address 10.211.55.1: Query refused
*** Default servers are not available
Server: UnKnown
Address: 10.211.55.1

*** UnKnown can't find google.com: Query refused

 

The Parallels Desktop PD4 Shared Networking is quite dumb with DNS (it is greatly improved in PD5, btw) and it is just using the first found DNS-server on Mac Host.

So, it seems that there is some DNS-server configured on Mac that returns REFUSED on all queries. For example, Work-network is 10.0.0.0/24 and it's dns-server 10.0.0.1. If request to this server 10.0.0.1 is sent not from the network 10.0.0.0/24, the server 10.0.0.1 may be configured to answer REFUSED on it.

You need either open Mac OS System Preferences -> Network and remove the dns-server that causes trouble, or configure the DNS inside Windows Guest to use say 208.67.222.222 (opendns-server) as primary DNS-server and 10.211.55.1 as secondary

 

Thanks, that was exactly the problem. Somehow the first (of two) DNS servers didn't resolve the queries anymore. The Mac host OS still worked without any problems, but the Parallels guest didn't. Now after removing the non-working server from the DNS server list, everything's fine again.