Before I go installing a Linux box with bind or similar, I'm making a final plea for help.
We have a small office with a Win2K3 Standard Server hosting our domain and providing the office nameserver. The workstations are all Windows XP or Windows 7, pretty standard stuff. There are some Linux machines acting as development servers but none provide DNS.
Our problem is that, at random, a Windows workstation will return a "Host not found" (NX result) for local (WINS) lookups until we issue:
ipconfig /registerdns
ipconfig /flushdns
on that workstation. During this loss, other workstations successfully look the target up and the Windows Server itself shows the WINS address as present. These "outages" occur at random - one might occur five minutes after the ipconfig reset trick, while later in the day I might get away with several hours of uninterrupted service.
This only seems to occur on WINS addresses - "agile" for instance or "billing" which are both registered with IPs on the server. Many of our staff have taken to adding the host and IP map to their Windows' hosts file due to the frequency of occurance.
Any ideas?