We are having an issue where computers who are not part of the domain cannot resolve the FQDN of a server (but regular hostname and ip do resolve). The strange thing is that this does work when the computer is added to the network.
Our domain name is rather long, its something along the lines of "team.dept.company.com", could that be it?
DHCP server passes along the proper DNS, Name and WINS servers, as well as the domain name. I thought that should've solved the problem, but apparently not really.
Our domain is still windows2003
EDIT: I am starting to believe I can narrow this down to a problem either with the vmware tools NIC drivers that are embedded in my winPE boot image, or to the fact that I'm trying to do this from inside a VM. Pinging a FQDN at the same time when using a different task sequence on a physical machine works.
From what I gather Hannes, you are using either MDT (Microsoft Deployment Toolkit) or WDS (Windows Deployment Server). In that case, when you load into the PE environment you are not going to be able to interact with the resources you are trying to by design from Microsoft. It's funny you'd ask this, because I just worked with a Microsoft consultant today on this very thing. The PE environment is designed to keep a sort of hedge, if you will, around the systems that are having an OS deployed to them. To interact with them you will need the right drivers for not only the PE environment, but also your system.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure you're talking about MDT with PE environment loading from PXE. Let me know and I can troubleshoot further for you.
A link for reference: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/440812-imaging-with-mdt-and-wds-networking-issues
In the DNS settings in the advanced settings of the TCP/IP protocol on the NIC of the computers in question set the "Append these DNS suffixes (in order)" option with the appropriate DNS suffixes and configure the computers to use your internal DNS server for DNS.
EDIT
Oops. I didn't read your question and the comments carefully enough. I thought your problem was with resolving unqualified, single-label names. It appears that's not the case. You should configure the computers in question to use the DNS server as their DNS server. When they issue a request/query for the FQDN of a host your internal server should be able to answer it.
As a test you can run a packet capture program on one of the affected computers, start a capture, filter the capture for DNS, issue a query for the FQDN of a host on the network and look at the capture to see what the query is. This should show you if the query is for the proper FQDN or if other DNS suffixes are being appended to the query.
Add the FQDN into the DNS Suffix Search List on the computers that are not part of your domain. This is configured under Advanced TCP/IP settings, DNS tab ... Append these DNS suffixes (in order).