Troubleshooting DNS speed and reliability issues

[David Rysdam]

An agent or agents purporting to be Ralph Mack said:
> I've had other problems where DNS drops out entirely for minutes at a 
> time but the network otherwise
> appears to be fine - pings to IPs, etc. work. Since it affects all the 
> machines here, I figured it was either my
> router or Comcast DNS. Now I don't know what to think. What would be 
> useful, though, is to know
> how to troubleshoot that as well.

I just set up tomato[1] this weekend and noticed the following under
the "Advanced" networking options:

    Intercept DNS port
    (UDP 53)

It's off by default, but maybe you have something like this turned on?
It may not need to be tomato, obviously--even the default linksys
firmware may do this, perhaps without even being an option.  I have no
idea, since I didn't even glance at the firmware before blowing it
away.

	[1] http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato