I have gentoo and gnome installed on this laptop. I also put NetworkManager on it to handle all my wireless networks and stuff. Now I have noticed that when I type in a domain name in firefox and epiphany it takes about 5-10 seconds to load the page. Whereas if I just type in the ip the page will load pretty fast. So I tried using dnsmasq for caching the domain name stuff so it wont take as long, but NetworkManager takes over my /etc/resolv.conf so its hard to keep dnsmasq working correctly. Anyone know of a fix for this slow dns stuff?

Maybe it has to do with my firewall, which is running IPCop. Can anyone hook me up with some good external nameservers?

There is a HowTo on the Gentoo site which deals with that problem, but using pdnsd instead.
Maybe you can adapt it to dnsmasq.
I only found a german version - the steps are easily recognizable though and translate.google.com might do a good enough job on it if you can't find an english version.
http://de.gentoo-wiki.com/DNS_beschleunigen

Thanks. That looks like a good workaround for my problem. I will use that in the mean time, but im still looking for a more direct solution to this problem. I have not yet tested to see if the NetworkManager is the cause. I will do that when I get off of work.
From what I found out with google is that NetworkManager could be sending out edns0 questions/signals to my router/firewall and my firewall may not recognize it. Here is the post I read that from.
http://osdir.com/ml/network.networkm.../msg00074.html

I havent tested that on my system yet either, but the symptoms are the same: 5-10 second wait using domain names, but loading instantly with an IP address.

Just for educational purposes:
can you tell how you find that out?
I have wireshark and also tcpdump - but I don't know what or where to look for in the dumps/captures to see if that is the case.
(I also use NetworkManager but have no problemswith it - but my connection is a different one)

try opendns.com