Again, thanks for all the help so far.

The thing that I keep coming to is that it appears named is not running on 
this machine.

"service named xxx", where xxx is anything gives me no output. 
/etc/init.d/named xxx gives no output.

GoFast is my provider, and /etc/resolv.conf contains just the one 
nameserver for them: 209.46.63.1. Since I'm not running named (or am I?) I 
can't imagine the content of that file matters.

ps gives no named, pidof named returns nothing.

Here's the beginning of /etc/init.d/named, where it apparently just quits:
#!/bin/bash
#
# named           This shell script takes care of starting and stopping
#                 named (BIND DNS server).
#
# chkconfig: - 55 45
# description: named (BIND) is a Domain Name Server (DNS) \
# that is used to resolve host names to IP addresses.
# probe: true

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

# Source networking configuration.
. /etc/sysconfig/network

RETVAL=0
prog="named"

# Check that networking is up.
[ "${NETWORKING}" = "no" ] && exit 0

[ -r /etc/sysconfig/named ] && . /etc/sysconfig/named

[ -x /usr/sbin/named ] || exit 0 

[ -r ${ROOTDIR}/etc/named.conf ] || exit 0 


start() {

<<< end of excerpt

It should be standard Red Hat issue.
/etc/sysconfig/named exists and has only comments.
/usr/sbin/named exists and is executable.

Aha. /etc/named.conf did not exist. I made a blank file, and service named 
now prints "rndc: connect failed: connection refused".

I'd appreciate a pointer to a quick and dirty HOWTO on DNS. I've looked at 
one pretty bad page, so pointers to a good one would be nice.

Once I get named running, I can add GoFasts second DNS machine to the 
resolv.conf file, and see how that goes.

Chris Schumann


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