It's a small office of about ten computers. I noticed that one could not manually check for Windows 7 updates and I started to check the others and noticed the same problem. I logged into the 2003 Server that's hosting the DNS and made sure the forwarders were good. I changed them to the following:
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
After I made the change I ran an IPCONFIG /FLUSDNS on the server and manually restarted the DNS cleint and server service. Then I went over to the workstation that was pointed to that local DNS server and ran and IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS and tried windows updates again. No luck same error.
Next on the workstation I manually pointed it to the Google DNS IP's above and ran another /FLUSHDNS and it worked. Why won't our local DNS server work if it's using the same IP's? Does it need to be rebooted after changing the DNS forwarders? I tried running an NSLOOKUP to microsoft.com on our server and it times out. Any ideas?