Setting up named.conf under RH8.0 using named.custom

[Landy Atkinson]

I have recently installed Red Hat 8.0 on a server and am in the process 
of setting up Bind.  I have a working configuration running on another 
server running Red Hat 6.2 that I am using as a model.  The DNS server 
is set up as the master DNS for my intranet at work and a caching DNS 
for my local clients for the rest of the world.  My question is not 
about specific Bind configuration, but rather the Red Hat 8.0 way to do 
things.

In /etc/named.conf there is a warning not to manually edit the file and 
to instead use /etc/named.custom for configurations that cannot be setup 
using redhat-config-bind.  I have played around and not been able to set 
my desired configuration using the GUI redhat-config-bind.

Using manual editing, I can get things to work just fine.  My problem is 
that in /etc/named.custom, I need to use additional option{}; commands 
that I cannot seem to get into /etc/named.conf using redhat-config-bind.  
In particular I want the following.

  options {
          directory "/var/named";
          forward first;
          forwarders {
                  192.168.207.15;
                  24.92.226.13;
                  24.92.226.174;
                  24.92.226.172;
                  24.92.226.171;
                  };
          };

Since the /etc/named.conf only contains a subset of these, I have tried 
to add another options{}; in /etc/named.custom, but bind doesn't start 
and upon reviewing /var/log/messages, what I see is errors indicating 
that bind doesn't like two option{}; statements.

If I comment out all the stuff in /etc/named.conf below the 
include "/etc/named.conf"; then it works.  Doesn't seem like this should 
be necessary, so I must be doing something wrong.

Any suggestions?

-Landy