Why is the Mac RDP Client is no longer connecting to hostnames, only IPs?

Question

Hello Everyone,

My fiance uses a macbook pro. OS is Sequoia 15.2 and Microsoft RDP is 10.9.6. She's always been able to RDP to her work computer via the fqdn. She just ran some updates and can no longer connect to the fqdn, it will only connect to the IP. However, if I open a terminal and ping the fqdn it resolves the IP and the ping is successful. I can also run nc -zv {fqdn} 3389 and that comes back successful as well. I can't seem to figure out why the Microsoft RDP client can't resolve the fqdn and everything else on the mac can.

Thanks!
Greg

Answer 1

We solved similar .local domain name resolving problems by enabling local network access for the RDP application (in our case the Windows App 11.0.8, macos 15.2) in Settings->Privacy&Security->Local Network. This has to be done for every user separately. Now both works: hostname and hostname.local

If the local network access is disabled for the App, then only hostnames are working. But this may get you into issues with name mismatching, if the server certificate is hostname.local and you run Kerberos only authentication (we switched NTLM authentication off).