I concatenate several of Les's emails in this message:
There is a checkbox in the network setup that controls whether you use the dhcp-supplied DNS servers or not, but others have mentioned a bug in it.
How do I launch that from the command line? I seem to have erased to many things in cleaning up the Kmenu!
Did you try the 'dig' command to test each of the addresses? If they work but are slow, you could improve things by installing the caching-nameserver package.
I will install the package anyway, but how do you define slow? 20 ms? 80 ms?
Are you 'behind' a university controlled network or directly on the internet? If someone else controls the network branch there is some chance that you are behind a transparent proxy that intercepts port 80 and tries to resolve requests from a cache - and perhaps logs and filters what you are doing. If this is overloaded or mismanaged it can slow things down.
I'm on a commercial ISP, not the university. So far as I know, I'm right there on the net. I don't think that there are any ports being blocked, and I don't know of any filtering/logging going on. I'll ask. I should know about this if it is happening. Dotan Cohen http://simplesniff.com