Cannot ping an address but nslookup works

Had an odd thing happen yesterday. I could nslookup names from my computer but couldn’t ping them. Ping would give an error as below:

Very odd.

This is not just ping, nothing in my system could connect to these addresses.

Nslookup works by querying the DNS servers directly. Ping and the OS work by telling the Windows DNS Resolver to query the DNS servers. Both should be querying the same servers (unless I specifically tell nslookup to check with someone else) so in theory both should work the same – but oddly it doesn’t.

I restarted the DNS Client service (called dnscache) and then everything began working as expected. Not sure what was really wrong …