DNS Dropouts

[hansolo77]

I'm a simple home user here, nothing professional or enterprise/commercial level. I've also just started using pfSense in the last few months so I'm very newbish...

I've been having these strange DNS drop outs with PC's connected to my router. Everything will be working fine, but some times a website will just refuse to load, saying the address can't be found. I've noticed, if I go to a site like "isitdownrightnow.com" it will say it's reachable, so the problem is on my end. When I notice a website is unreachable, I'll switch over to my pfSense and see in the services that the unbound service (DNS Resolver) is be offline. I'm not sure what could be causing it, since I don't manually turn it off...

One thing I HAVE noticed though, is that my OpenVPN client to IPVANISH on the router will be connected, and by turning it off I can then access those webpages that are unreachable. So I think my problem might be with IPVANISH, but it could be a setting in the OpenVPN for the client.

Would somebody out there be willing to help me troubleshoot this? Is it a problem with the DNS resolver on the machine itself, or a problem with the OpenVPN settings? Anybody use IPVANISH as a daily VPN to hide traffic that could help me compare settings?

Thanks guys, whoever replies! :)