Private DNS newbie question.

[Ken]

I am trying to setup a small DNS on a private network - strictly for
learning.  I have a single small PC dedicated to the DNS job and it has
RH-9. My problem is that there is very little info available such a
private DNS - it is all for real Internet DNS's.

I have tried several examples from the 'net, and copied one verbatium from
the RH9 Bible.  All of them give the same error from the DNS machine or
any others on the network...

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

/etc/init.d/named starts ok and doesn't post any errors in the message
log.
named-checkconf and named-checkzone run ok. resolv.conf follows their
examples.
I can ping anything from any direction.

Since even the very minimal examples give the same time out message no
matter what I do,  I am beginning to think that I have something more
basic that is wrong - like I didn't load something on the install of
Linux.

Is there something that should be running besides /etc/init.d/named
daemon?

Does anyone have some very simple named, zone and resolv scripts that I
can use to test and build on?

Thanks
Ken