?'s about forwarders

[beetle bailey]

First I'd like to apologize for not providing any specifics, but this is all 
info that's only available internally so I'm afraid it wouldn't help anyway. 
  I hope it's not too confusing.

Is there any reason a forward-only nameserver won't respond to a query for a 
zone that it is a slave for with info from one of it's db files?  We have 2 
servers, both forward-only and both slaves for this particular domain but 
they give out different mx records.  Also, they both give out the same soa 
record which is not the master of the zone listed in their named.conf files 
but rather the first forwarder listed there.  One server gives out the mx 
records listed in the db file that should have come from the master for the 
zone and the other gives out the mx records from the forwarder (which are 
the mail servers available to the rest of the internet but not our internal 
network -- hence the initial problem).  I would have thought the soa record 
for the zone we're a slave for would come from the db file listed in 
named.conf but it seems to come from the forwarder even though mx records 
seem to come on one server from the local db file and the other from the 
forwarder.  Can someone explain why that is?  On top of this, it turns out 
the administrator that called me (who belongs to another subdomain that 
controls their own nameservers) with the initial report of undeliverable 
mail is forwarding all requests other than their own domain to our servers 
which are slaves for all of the internal domains but are also set up as 
forwarders themselves.  DNS & BIND cautions against this, though I have to 
admit I don't understand why.  I'd appreciate whatever  info you can give 
me.  Thanks.
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