"Short" domains...

[Ray Van Dolson]

I'm not sure quite how to properly describe this, and as a result my
searches aren't turning up much....

To support a legacy app, I need to have a domain defined called
"selfservice" so I can support resolution of "www.selfservice".  Yes,
no trailing .com, .net, etc.... ugly, but I need it for now.

This domain actually lives on our AD servers, so I thought I'd do the
following:

zone "selfservice" {
    type forward;
    forwarders { adserver....; };
};

However, this doesn't work.  Queries just return the TLD servers for .
as the SOA.  Querying the AD servers directly works fine.

However, if I actually define a master zone:

zone "selfservice" {
    type master;
    file "selfservice.zone";
    notify yes;
    allow-transfer { secondary; };
};

And explicitly define the A record I need, then queries for
www.selfservice respond correctly.

It's almost as if BIND prefers the less specific hint zone for "." over
my forward zone definition for "selfservice" -- but not if I make it a
master zone...

Any ideas?

Am running BIND 9.8.2 on RHEL6.

Thanks,
Ray