[PLUG] DNS weirdness

[Keith Lofstrom]

A friend runs dwstudios.net, hosted on hostica.com.  I am having
problems accessing either URL from my RHEL5 network.  I can ping the
IP addresses, but DNS is not finding them.  "dig" responds with
    ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

I can find the machines by URL with an outside SUSE machine, and
an outside Fedora9 machine, and can get details with "dig" (the
sites are their own AUTHORITY, unusual!)  so the problem is
apparently my own funky DNS setup interacting with their name
service.  I haven't seen any problems with other sites.

I can reach the machines if I hard code the URL and  IP address
into /etc/hosts , but that is a test, not a permanent fix.  Ugly!

I have BIND 9 set up on my nameserver (running on the firewall), 
the usual Redhat named version, running chrooted.  With named
running, I am not using outside name servers, just the root
authorities (?) and my own cache.  I think.  I set it up years
ago, with an occasional tweak, and mostly forgot what I did.
BIND is much more complicated than the 3 brain cells I've
allocated to run it.

To see what is going on, I set up /etc/sysconfig/named to run
named with a "-d 6" in the command line - no debug messages anywhere
I can detect.  I also added a stanza to logging in /etc/named.conf,
set to "severity dynamic".   named finds the log file mentioned,
but puts nothing in it. 

Plainly, I don't know what I am doing, but it would be nice to look
at some error messages somewhere and get a glimmer of a clue. 

So Question 2 (which I have probably not given you enough information
to answer) is "what is wrong with my DNS"?

Question 1, which perhaps somebody can answer, is "how do I set up
named (running chroot) to give me enough debug information to answer
question 2"?

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs