Pinging the outside world...

I can ping the server running named, the dns server can ping all of the servers in the locals file, but it cannot find any hosts outside of itself. I have the root.hints file. Is there a setting that is supposed to allow the server to see other hosts outside of itself that I am missing?


zone "." {
type hint;
file "root.hint";
};

zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" {
type master;
file "db.127.0.0";
notify no;
};

>> the dns server can ping all of the servers in the locals file

What do you mean?

>> to allow the server to see other hosts outside of itself

Change this file "root.hint"; to file "root.hints";

Keep in mind that many people (even at sysadmin level) are confused about the terminology of DNS server because the wildly used BIND integrates a caching DNS resolver (not a DNS server) and authoritative DNS server (this is the DNS server) into one package (a big daemon). When you are trying to query other authoritative DNS server for an answer, you are really using a caching DNS resolver.

For caching-only DNS resolver, consider using dnscache.

Thanks for pointing out the root.hints mistype. It turns out that when I followed the DNS Howto on adding the localhost entry to the resolv.conf file, I somehow disabled my ability to ping anyone outside of the localhost. I shuffled the IPs around and success. Thanks again. :}

>> on adding the localhost entry to the resolv.conf file

It's very common to put:

nameserver 127.0.0.1

to /etc/resolv.conf.