On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Troy.A Johnson wrote:
> Make your caching name server the primary DNS 
> server (first on the list in '/etc/resolv.conf') and make 
> sure all local hosts are in '/etc/hosts' (full and unqualified
> names). If you don't want to use '/etc/hosts' you can 
> just configure named to be authoritative for your hosts
> (then you could do reverse lookups too).

 In particular, dnsmasq (http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/) might be a 
good solution for this.  It's a combination DHCP & DNS server that can 
serve up local DNS data (both forward and reverse) from /etc/hosts on the 
server.  It's fairly lightweight, and the configuration is dead simple 
(generally, one line each in /etc/hosts and /etc/dnsmasq.conf per static 
DHCP entry).
 Discovered it a couple months ago, and I've transitioned all of my 
private networks to using it.

     Jima