gethostbyname fails

[Adam Noble]

Hi all,

I'm confused. I am getting a specific error in my syslog for a laptop that is connecting to my server. It is saying unable to gethostbyname for a specific host. What I have no idea on is how its getting the host in the 1st place. If I do an nslookup on that host there is no reference and the IP address of the Laptop also returns nothing. I've never seen anything like this. How is it possibly getting this hostname reference. DNS finds nothing

Cheera

[TTr]

Which service is reporting this error on the server?

Without any more details I am guessing that the laptop is making a connection to your server, ftp or telnet or whatever, and your server is trying to do a reverse lookup of the laptop's IP address and can not resolve it to a hostname.