Inconsistent Behavior with 'forward first'

[Chad Philip Johnson]

Greetings all,

I've been chasing my tail over a strange configuration issue and was 
hoping somebody could point me in the right direction.

I have two forwarders defined in my main 'options' section, but when 
'forward first' is enabled all lookups go to the root servers as if 
forwarding is completely disabled. This behavior is also the same for 
name lookups that exist in locally defined zones.

When I change the configuration to 'forward only', lookup requests are 
forwarded and resolved properly, but of course lookup through the root 
servers is no longer available.

Four systems are exhibiting this issue: two running Rocky Linux 8 with 
BIND 9.11.26-RedHat-9.11.26-6.el8 (Extended Support Version) 
<id:3ff8620>, and two running Rocky Linux 9 with BIND 9.16.23-RH 
(Extended Support Version) <id:fde3b1f>.

My configuration is pretty straightforward and I'm someone who (mostly) 
knows what he's doing. That said, I might be missing something obvious, 
or looking at an important detail a bit cross-eyed. I have spent some 
time searching through various BIND resources and bug reports. I also 
combed through a few dozen old messages on this mailing list.

If I'm being too brief on configuration details then I can share any and 
all relevant information, I just didn't want to dump potentially 
extraneous information into this message.

Best,

-- 
Chad Philip Johnson