[Sunhelp] strange DNS problem

[saul]

I have a rather odd DNS problem.  I am running both Solaris 2.6 on a sparc5/85, 
and Solaris 7-x86 on a P2-266, and I have the problem on both at the same time.

Here it is:
	This morning, the cable modem I was using to connect to the internet had 
some scheduled downtime.  Everything was well, except that now ewery once in a 
while the cable flickers out for a second, ie there is a little break in the 
connection.  I came home after the outage, and tried to check my email.  The DNS 
lookup failed, so I tried pinging the IMAP host directly, and that worked fine.  
So I was able to Ping out just fine, but DNS lookups were not functioning 
correctly.
	I then checked that my DNS servers were up.  They were.  In fact, from 
my terminal I could "nslookup" just fine.  I couldn't resolve names from the 
command line though.  I then checked the nsswitch.conf file, and the line read 

hosts: dns files

	I beat my head against the wall for a while, and tried SEVERAL different 
DNS servers.  All worked with the nslookup method (using the '-' switch) but no 
matter how many DNS servers I tried putting into resolv.conf (and then 
restarting the S69inet daemon), the 'ping' command wouldn't work.
	I then set up my sparc5 as a dns server, and tried pinging within my 
small subnetwork (the cable modem is run through a masquerading server), and all 
worked well.  So only when the DNS server was BEYOND the gateway was there a 
problem.
	I thought this might be a network wide problem, but all the windows 
boxes behind the gateway were working correctly...only my 2 sun boxes were 
faltering.  I reset both computers several times.  I ran a portscanner on 
differet DNS servers to see if the DNS lookup port on my nameserver was closed, 
but everything was identical on all the servers.
	In desperation, I went back to the terminal and typed 
ping yahoo.com
	and the IMMEDIATE response was 
yahoo.com is alive.

	Not 2 minutes before, the DNS hadn't been working and I hadn't done jack 
since then!
	
	I'm thankful that it works now, but I don't know what to do if this 
happens again!!  Has anyone had a similar problem?  Is there a seperate daemon 
for the naming services?  I know /etc/rc2.d/S69inet is the daemon that reads the 
resolv.conf file, but which is the daemon that reads /etc/nsswitch.conf?
	
	What do I do if this happens in the future??
	
	Thanks so much
	
Saul Farber