Hello, I'd really appreciate anyone who has any suggestions for this problem. I have two computers networked. One computer has Windows 2000 Server, the other has Windows 2000 Pro. I installed Active Directory on Server using dcpromo, and set up DNS in the process. Server computer is a Domain Controller, the FQDN is server.test.network.com. The 2000 Pro computer is a member of this domain. The FQDN for this computer is win2k98.test.network.com. There were already two host records created by DNS for both computers under the zone test.network.com on DNS. I right-clicked on the zone, went to New Alias, made up the name TEST and put in win2k98.test.network.com for the targeg FQDN. Now, if I go to Start > Run and type in backslash-backslashTEST, I get the message "A duplicate name exists on the network". Why is this happening? Thanks very much to anyone with suggestions!

yeah, it's a cute little problem isn't it. I think that you will probably find that the computer that you are doing the query from is the same computer that you have created the CNAME record for. Try it from the other pc (you may have to use the fqdn if you don't have the dns suffix already plugged in to your tcp/ip settings) i think you will find that it works ok from there. Microsoft article Q281308 acknowledges the problem, but you have to contact them for a fix. (or wait for the next sp). All they seem to say is that the servers are not on alias records. I would think that as a result, when you query a alias record from the pc the alias was created on, and dns returns the computers own ip address, it sees it as 2 computers and gives the duplicate ip address error

Thanks for the advice! Well, unfortunately I'm still having the same problem. I'd like to mention though, the computer that I am running the query from is not the same one that I created the CNAME for. I really do appreciate your time to have replied to my message. Thanks again. I'll keep searching around and break my head over this. When I finally get it, I'm sure I won't ever forget it again! :-) Thank you!