debugging adcli info - short name not returned

In one of our test domains, we noticed that the short name of the domain was not being
returned by "adcli info" (it is visible in the output of "net rpc
info" though and it is clearly configured in Windows and can be seen in the GUI and
CLI of Windows).

Running "adcli info --verbose" we see only a few lines about contacting servers,
but nothing obvious to me.

Any ideas about common reasons that adcli info can't return short domain name from a
particular win2K8 server but ok to others (while "net" can always return it). 
Note that joining the domain (via realm) does work - even though can't get short name