General Questions

Prior to switching from IPcop to monowall, this problem didn't happen.  Since using monowall, we get intermittent DNS (I think it's DNS?) failures.  I will try to explain them as best I can.

Approximately 5 or so times per hour and per user (we have around 30 users here), we get failures to load pages.  For example, if someone tries to go to google, their browser will say "looking up google.com" and will time out.  Hitting the refresh or try again button, and then the page will load just fine.  If trying to load multiple pages during one of the outages, both pages will fail.  The outages last maybe 10 or so seconds, but if you try to load a page during that time, it just returns the page can not be found error.

I did some searching here on the forums, but didn't see any threads that specifically addressed an issue like this.

We are using version 1.235.

DHCP is disabled as is DHCP relay.
DNS forwarder is enabled, Register DHCP leases in DNS forwarder is not enabled.
Dynamic DNS is not enabled.

Again, this problem is very intermittent but happens a few times a day to everyone here and its more of a nusiance than a problem.  Any help or place to look for possible bugs would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.

If you are using DNS Forwarder and getting DNS issues, it means the DNS Forwarder is making a request and not getting back a response.  You could try turning off DNS forwarder which will force all your computers to contact the DNS server directly to see if that resolves the issue.

If you continue to have issues with DNS forwarder turned off, it means there is either a problem with the DNS servers you are using or something is interrupting the connection to those DNS servers when it happens.

See if you can ping those DNS servers first. If you can, next time this happens, run a quick command prompt to ping the DNS servers to see if they respond to a ping. If they don't, it means something is either interrupting your connection somewhere between you and them; or the people running the DNS server are having issues of their own.

A few steps at a time and you should be able to track down the source of the problem.

Also, if you machine is up to spec, I would recommend up grading to the 1.3 release of m0n0wall as it's a painless process to do it without your configuration getting all messed up. Just be sure to follow the upgrade steps exactly 

Try the application "namebench" for some "comparable" values:

http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

try using open or free dns upstream servers, like googles on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
and consider using the all-servers opyion in the forwarder