DNS Issues - MacbookAir running Snow Leopard

Question

It seems like it has been since the update to snow leopard when my dns issues started, but I'm not quite sure that is the problem.
I have a MBA, so all of my networking is done over my Wireless(AirPort)
I can connect to ANY Wireless Networks fine, grab a DHCP address just fine, and also grab 2/3 DNS servers from the DHCP server just fine.
My issue is that at random intervals my MBA will stop resolving addresses. It can continue to ping out to a DNS server via it's IP address, but will have a connection timeout on resolving the address for roughly 45 seconds. When the 45 seconds is up, it will begin to resolve addresses again. I have poked around google and found that it could be due to DNS sever priorities in Snow Leopard using the bottom DNS first instead of the top. I ruled out that issue by adding on one static DNS server (4.2.2.1)in my network configurations manually.
This happens on every network I am connected to that has a gateway to the internet. I have not tried to resolve local names on a local network, but I have tried resolving 'normal' addresses.
For now, I'm writing this post via remote desktop (windows machine) from my MBA with a static IP inserted as the address because if I stick a address that needs resolved first, every 3-10 minutes it will freeze and won't resolve the name, lose the connection until it can resolve the names again.
I have posted what I thought might help someone else diagnose the issue, because I am stump. Please take a look at my testing outputs here:
http://www.oregonstate.edu/~hillchri/dns
Check out the nettestout.txt is where I did the following bash script:
#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..5000}
do
echo $(date)
ping -c 1 4.2.2.1 | grep ms
echo "nslookup www.google.com"
nslookup www.google.com
echo "nslookup www.yahoo.com"
nslookup www.yahoo.com
echo "dig @4.2.2.1 google.com"
dig @4.2.2.1 google.com
echo "------------------------------------------------"
done
Message was edited by: chillconsulting

Answer 1

Did you read the note at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4030 ?
As of Snow Leopard, Apple does not directly use BIND but the utilities linked with BIND (such as dig and nslookup) still do:
Mac OS X NOTICE
The nslookup command does not use the host name and address resolution or the DNS query routing
mechanisms used by other processes running on Mac OS X. The results of name or address queries
printed by nslookup may differ from those found by other processes that use the Mac OS X native name
and address resolution mechanisms. The results of DNS queries may also differ from queries that use
the Mac OS X DNS routing library.
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/m an1/nslookup.1.html
Instead, DNS lookup in commands such as ping and for applications such as Safari is handled by mDNSResponder, and the Apple Tech Note listed above describes how it works:
In Mac OS X v10.6 and later, the search order of DNS servers specificed in Network preferences is dynamic, so that servers that don't respond are moved to the end of the search order.
and:
In Mac OS X v10.6, the default DNS server searching behavior is that when a server does not return a result or when it returns SERV_FAIL for a query, and other servers are available to query, the server is temporarily disabled in the search order.