DNS at home

Maybe I’m creating my own problem but I’m kind of stuck. I have a handful of hosts at home and a 64 address DHCP block for which I have a TLD setup on a Solaris machine. nslookup from the Windows clients always works (it always asks the primary DNS server, the Solaris machine), but when I have a second DNS server listed sometimes the web browsers don’t properly look up internal hosts (e.g., the router or the printer), I get host name undefined errors. To resolve the problem I removed the secondary DNS server from all the windows clients (one of Google’s public DNS servers) and now everything works. Which would be fine but sometimes I have to take the Solaris machine down and for that time period no web surfing happens and that’s not good for SAF*…

Is it normal behavior for the resolver library (in Windows?) to round robin the DNS servers? When I run snoop on the Solaris box I see queries come in and get resolved, then suddenly nothing and that’s when that client’s web browser returns a host not found, it appears that my DNS server was not queried.

I wanted to setup a secondary name server in house, preferably on the router (if it’s down there’s no surfing anyway) but it doesn’t seem like any of the router firmwares support being a (secondary) DNS server (at least not by default). Am I missing something about the router firmwares? Am I configuring something on my Windows clients wrong?

My router is a NetGear WNR3500L, if I reserve IPs for various hosts and set the Windows client to use the router as a DNS server will it return addresses from names?

*Spouse Acceptance Factor