after reading those posts further I'll forward what was said there and the solution:
solution 1vfrom alpha996:
"Fix for DNS problems in XP
Look at the list of DNS servers (ipconfig /all), two start with 216 and 204 and two will start with 12. Attbi uses the 12.x.x.x servers for internal machines. They only resolve mail and news and respond with an authoritative "host not found" if they try to resolve any other name. Their servers should forward queries to a DNS server that can resolve the name, in this case the ones that start with 216.x.x.x or 204.x.x.x or respond with an un-authoritative "host not found" so XP would try another DNS server. The reason for sporadic results is that XP will sometimes try the 12.x.x.x servers first and XP gets returned the wrong answer. ATTbi needs to fix this (and will I believe). In the mean time the best fix would be to ONLY change the "Obtain DNS servers automatically" to "Use the following DNS server addresses" and enter only the other DNS servers, 216.148.227.68 and 204.127.202.4. Then be sure to use mail/news with the full domain names, as mail.attbi.com and netnews.attbi.com. This can be changed back to "Obtain automatically" when ATT fixes the resolution on there servers. This should also up your throughput. I believe this will fix DNS problems with Win98, WinMe, and 2000 also. Hope this helps."
Solution 2 from bigjoesmith:
"Regarding the "page not found" error (for obviously existing pages) that people are reporting. Here is what is happening and a suggestion on how to fix the problem.
Before a web page like
www.yahoo.com can be loaded, the domain name must be resolved to an IP address (e.g. 64.58.76.228). This resolution is performed by a domain name server (a DNS server). Each resolution by a DNS server returns the proper IP for the domain name and a TTL (time to live) value for the resolution. The TTL specifies how long the result may be cached. Caching allows subsequent resolution to take place directly out of the local machine's cache rather than going over the network to the DNS server. Caching is a good thing. Windows 2000 and Windows XP have client DNS resolvers that cache.
As it happens, some of attbi.com's DNS servers are, at times, returning bogus resolutions. In particular they are failing to resolve valid domain names. Windows 2000 and Windows XP can also cache negative responses. So when Windows XP asks an attbi.com name server for
www.ibm.com and gets a response that
www.ibm.com does not exist, Windows will cache this negative response. Likewise, when the client resolver gets a negative response from any DNS server on it's list of DNS servers, it stops any other pending queries for the same name on any other DNS server. This is by design. Subsequent requests for
www.ibm.com will immediately return "does not exist" until the cached negative response times out and is removed from the cache. With a non-caching DNS resolver (e.g. such as Windows 95 has), subsequent requests will once again query a DNS server.
So with DNS servers that return false negative responses and a client resolver that caches negative responses you can get the kind of resolution problems that people are reporting (and which I have witnessed myself).
Some people have suggested solving the problem by using different DNS servers. This will indeed work if the chosen DNS servers function correctly and do not return bogus responses. However, in a DHCP-configured environment like attbi.com's, it's best, in the long run, to accept and use the DHCP-supplied DNS servers. This allows attbi.com to manage things automatically over time. attbi.com DNS servers should, as attbi.com gets it act together, be faster to respond than other servers since they will be closer (network hop wise) to your machine. Finally, other ISPs won't enjoy you using their servers.
Some people have suggested turning off the DNS resolver service (the client side DNS resolver) on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This will indeed work for this failure case. However, turning off the Windows DNS resolver is not an optimal solution. I don't recommend it. The resolver is a very handy piece of code that does a lot work and has a lot of smarts to accomplish DNS resolution effectively. In particular, caching is a good thing. However, negative response caching, particularly in the face of false negatives, may not be ideal.
A better solution would be to limit or turn off negative response caching. This is accomplished by setting the NegativeCacheTime registry entry (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters). The NegativeCacheTime registry entry specifies for how many seconds negative responses are cached. The default value is 300 seconds. Setting the value to 0 will specify that negative responses should not be cached at all. (NegativeSOACacheTime should also be set to 0 if you want to turn off all negative response caching.)
For more information, see »
www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/def..[?]
(Some have pointed out that this URL is broken. For more information about the DNS client resolver in Windows 2000/XP, go to »
www.microsoft.com/technet[?] and search for "DNS Caching, Network Prioritization, and Security".)
[text was edited by author 2001-12-06 03:26:11]"
