intermittent internet connection

[Guest]

The place i am currently working has about 20 users and all with static ip addresses. they are using a firewall to permit a few computers to gain access to the internet. I am not to sure if that is the problem but here it is. DNS on the clients are pointing to the ISP DNS. the clients have connection but every so often they lose there connection. in order to rectify the issue they either have to repair the connection or switch the dns order in the TCP/IP settings.
This problem is on both W2k and XP machines. I have recommended a DHCP setup with a couple of reservations for the few computers to access to the internet. I would rather try to troubleshoot one machine then several.. any one have any idea i havent been able to find anything on this issue.....

 

[Simon Geary]

Do you use Active Directory? If AD is used then your client PC's should not
be configured to use an ISP DNS server. Rather everything should use your
local DNS server and that local server should forward to the ISP.

The place i am currently working has about 20 users and all with static ip

addresses. they are using a firewall to permit a few computers to gain
access to the internet. I am not to sure if that is the problem but here it
is. DNS on the clients are pointing to the ISP DNS. the clients have
connection but every so often they lose there connection. in order to
rectify the issue they either have to repair the connection or switch the
dns order in the TCP/IP settings.

This problem is on both W2k and XP machines. I have recommended a DHCP

setup with a couple of reservations for the few computers to access to the
internet. I would rather try to troubleshoot one machine then several.. any
one have any idea i havent been able to find anything on this issue.....

 

[Kevin D. Goodknecht]

In

The place i am currently working has about 20 users and all with
static ip addresses. they are using a firewall to permit a few
computers to gain access to the internet. I am not to sure if that is
the problem but here it is. DNS on the clients are pointing to the
ISP DNS. the clients have connection but every so often they lose
there connection. in order to rectify the issue they either have to
repair the connection or switch the dns order in the TCP/IP settings.
This problem is on both W2k and XP machines. I have recommended a
DHCP setup with a couple of reservations for the few computers to
access to the internet. I would rather try to troubleshoot one
machine then several.. any one have any idea i havent been able to
find anything on this issue.....

You will here all kinds of oppinions on reaching this objective, but I can
tell you that if this is an AD domain, allowing or denying access to the
ISP's DNS is not the way to meet this. This is because no machine in an AD
domain should be allowed access to the ISP's DNS through its TCP/IP
properties, all machines should point to the internal DNS server.
Since you have a firewall you could just allow these machines access to the
internet gateway and deny the rest access to the internet gateway. Then
configure DNS to resolve all internet names.

 

[Michael Johnston [MSFT]]

As everyone has already stated, if AD is involved, you need to point internally for DNS at the AD server. This doesn't explain the behavior that you are seeing
though. The problem as I understand it is that clients are unable to access the Internet periodically. This sounds like a client side DNS caching problem. On
the clients, stop and disable the DHCP client service. Let that run for a few days and see if the problem returns.

Thank you,
Mike Johnston
Microsoft Network Support

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