newbie ?? aboutgetting DNS running

[CLint Davis]

I have a subnetted class C from my ISP.  I will do my own DNS. I went
to Network Solutions and got a domain name.  To do my own DNS, ISP support
says they have to do nothing. Right?

I am using FreeBSD 3.3, and used books description on setting up a basic
DNS, 2 NS and a couple of CNAME machines.

I fire up "named" and I can use nslookup to display my records.  Problem
occurs when I use nslookup to resolve, say yahoo.com.  Nslookup hangs.  My
sniffer on the outbound network to the Internet shows 2000 packets/sec going
to one of the root nameservers.  I peg my T1 line with DNS traffic.

Im a newbie with DNS ( at least doing my own ) and dont know if this is
correct or an indication of setup problems.  Does DNS suck a ton of data
from root servers at startup?

If you need configs, I will provide.

Clint