This issue took me a while to figure out. It’s actually been an issue for a while but I didn’t notice it until XBMC became Kodi. XBMC moved their domain name to kodi.tv and suddenly I was unable to access their site at all.

An nslookup returns NXDOMAIN immediately; however, querying a different server, say Google’s DNS, would return a valid address.

After scratching my head for weeks I came across this post which outlines the exact same problem – any .tv domains are instantly not resolved. I didn’t notice it until XBMC moved to kodi.tv because I don’t visit .tv domains.

The culprit: static DNS entries without a fully qualified domain name. I have plenty of these, and in this case, I have a computer named simply “tv” which Sophos translates into an internal DNS zone; Consequently it doesn’t even bother querying other DNS servers for anything ending in .tv.

The fix: make sure you have fully qualified domain names for all of your static DNS entries. This best practice will save you headaches in the long run.