Intermittent Problems with earthlink.net

[Tory M. Blue]

I have been experiencing intermittent problems when resolving addresses for
Earthlink.net. I have discussed this with their IT/OPS department and they
say they are not blocking me and don't see a problem.

It has happened over the last few months and has really now started to be a
pain..

I'm running Bind 8 on Linux.

At certain points of any given day, night, earthlink will stop responding.
Can't dig, no nslookups, nothing and about 30+ minutes later if not longer,
it clears up. and I start to resolve earthlink again. I can see all other
domains, including eartlink.net (that's EART LINK), aol, hotmail, yahoo,
znet, whatever no problems, It's just earthlink.

No configuration changes on the firewalls or Bind 8 Linux systems during
these periods of function vs non functioning earthlink queries. I have
searched and there was a person sometime ago that was experiencing similar
issues as I, but there doesn't appear to be a resolution.

Is there anyone else out there with similar problems with earthlink?

I'm allowing UDP/TCP 53 into my DNS servers (although I feel that TCP/53 is
not really necessary, as most domains I talk to have a small enough answers
to fit into the UDP 512 packet) but it's opened just the same. Also recently
I added the query-source to force everything to answer me on port 53, and
I'm still seeing failures for 30+ minutes @ a time. As far as my monitoring
is concerned resolution of earthlink.net is running @ about 64% during a 5
day period, while aol and hotmail are 100%.

One last note, I have a distributed DNS setup and my other 8+ DNS servers @
various locations never have the problem with earthlink, and all servers are
an identical image -name and address. But we do query quite a bit from the
site that is having the intermittent probs.

Something with earthlink and I'm at my wits end trying to figure this out.
Any help on what to check and maybe what to provide to assist you in
assisting me?

Thanks a million

-Tory