Why can't I ping my server using its FQDN?

Solution 1:

When you do an nslookup [ip address] what you are seeing is the ptr record. But when you do a ping it uses an A record.

You're doing three different tests:

1. dig is returning the A record (but via cygwin, so it's not a good test of Windows lookup mechanism)
2. nslookup is returning the PTR record
3. ping is using Windows name resolution, which is a combination of hosts, netbios, dns and whatever other magical things might be installed.

Try doing an nslookup of nslookup server01.example.com and see what happens then.

Solution 2:

This behavior is still happening to me off and on. This latest time, I found this technet thread and tried turning off the dnscache service, which fixed the issue.

This seems like a bug in the Windows DNS client/cache.

net stop dnscache
net start dnscache