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> From: Tony Hoyle
> What we appear to be seeing in some cases is a combination of
> misconfigurations where a network is setup as if it is
> connected to the
> internet but isn't.. that's quite creative - I can't think of a way to
> do it (well not a sane way anyway.. certainly nothing that
> could be done accidentally).
I suspect Microsoft's default DNS settings in Windows 2000 and 2003 may be at fault, where root nameservers are configured by default. All you need then is for something to drop the outbound packets on the floor - for example a naïve firewall configuration that drops traffic from internal systems that "shouldn't" connect to the Internet, rather than returning the appropriate Network Unreachable error. Given that the default for many firewalls is now to drop packets rather than return any ICMP status, I can entirely see why a naïve configuration could cause this problem.
- Peter