There were some useful suggestions in you last posting; most of which I
had done at one time or another (but perhaps not all together at one
time in the right order). However, just before I saw your reply, I
actually got it to work. Let me explain what I tried first (which
didn't work), and then what I did to get it to work; maybe you can
explain where I went wrong the first time.

Initially, I create a zone called "local." (with dynamic updates
enable). I also set the server name to "mydns.local". The server has a
static IP address, and has it's own address as the DNS server in TCP/IP
Properties. On the client machine I set the DNS suffix to "local" and
the DNS server address to the IP address of mydns.

That did not work. From the client, I was able to ping the Internet,
and ping the mydns machine. If I manually added an A record to the
"local" zone, I could ping it as well. But updates did not work.

On a lark, I changed the DNS suffix to "local.stonehill.com", and added
that zone to mydns. Suddenly it started working. Note that the
authoritative DNS server for "stonehill.com" is not my DNS server (it's
TierraNet as it happens).

The only difference I can see is that with "local." there is no
"standard" top-level domain (com, net, org, etc). Could that be the
issue? It didn't seem to bother "ping", but maybe the DNS updater
"knows" too much? It doesn't seem likely, but I can't come up with any
other theory.

Cheers,

--mkj

Michael Jones
http://stonehill.com