DNS going up and down

Lately my company's DNS has been going up and down.

Problem:

During the day our internet will go out. But if you surf on a site you are already on you ok. But if I try to open another tab to a different web site I can't get out.

Also if messenger and streaming audio (i.e. Pandora) stays connected.

Went we are "down" I cannot ping an address by it's DNS but I can by it's IP address. I have to restart the DNS server to get it back going. Or restart the firewall will to the trick as well.

I am running SBS 2003 and am using open DNS as my fowarders.

Any suggestions?

Welcome to Dev Shed.

Have there been any changes to the server when you noticed the problem first started?

I would agree with Hiker, check DNS logs in event viewer as well as system logs. Could be a lot of things causing this that we need to try and narrow down.

I've checked my logs and there is nothing listed in them that are warnings or errors.

While I was having the problem I flushed the DNS and stopped and restarted the service, but still no go.

Also when I am having the problem even though I cannot connect to sites I can get to other computers using their DNS names.

Hmmm, this sounds like the problem is isolated to resolving external DNS names correctly? I'm not sure, check your forwarders and see if they're setup right. You can try start>admin tools>DNS>right click on the DNS server and click properties. Click the monitoring test and run a simple and recursive DNS test on the server; see if it passes. Maybe Hiker will no more as to the problem.

Also, does the problem exist only within your network, or are users outside your network experiencing the same problem?