Strange DNS problem

[brett okajima]

I'm a student worker at a college, and we've been getting a wierd
internet problem that doesn't seem documented and no one can figure
out. On XP pro, both SP1 and SP2, many computers aren't able to get on
the internet after logging in, usually for one or two minutes,
sometimes longer. During this period, ping will give unknown host
errors, but doing nslookup on any host, then plugging that IP into ping
or IE works fine. Nslookup working seems to mean that DNS should be
fine, but then why would ping not resolve the hostname?

The one thing I found by googling was the MaxNegativeCacheTtl registry
entry which can block the caching of failed DNS lookups. It might have
decreased the time it takes for the connection to start, but it might
have been my imagination, and in any case it didn't fix the problem.

Anyone encounter this before? Any solutions?

 

[Guest]

I am having a similar problem: See my question here under "XP cannot resolve
hostname (winsock problem?). Many have tried to help. I posted this also
under IE6 General and someone there suggested a winsock repair utility which
I just ran.

I've found that the problem can be put off for a while if I open a cmd
window and run ping -t <hostname>, which just pings endlessly. That keeps DNS
resolution working for a few hours even with inactivity, but eventually that,
too, fails.