bind9 forward zones

[Tom Allison]

Hello,

I'm trying to do two things with forwarders.

The first is to forward requests to my ISP DNS servers to avoid hitting 
the root servers where I can.  Originally I am pretty sure that my 
options{ forwarders...} was working correctly, but I can't validate that 
using dig.

The second is to forward a specific zone to another subnet (VPN) for 
domain resolution.  This second subnet has it's own domain servers and I 
would like to utilize them for that subnet for simplicity.

using things like dig +trace, it appears that I am using neither one of 
my forwarders.

So, two questions:
What is the correct method of using dig to validate that my forwarders 
are working correctly -- what should I see and what should I not see?

Is the following format actually correct?  It doesn't act like it.

Currently I have the following in my named.conf:

options {
  notify no;
         forwarders      {
                         24.169.224.226;
                         24.169.224.230;
                         };
         forward first;

         auth-nxdomain no;    # conform to RFC1035

         allow-query     {
                         192.168.3/24;
                         192.168.30/24;
                         127.0.0/24;
                         };

         allow-transfer { none; };
         recursion yes;
};


zone "vpndomain.com" {
         type forward;
         //forward first;
         forwarders { 192.168.30.2; };
         //allow-query { 192.168.3.0/24; };
         };

zone "30.168.192.in-addr.arpa" {
         type forward;
         //forward first;
         forwarders { 192.168.30.2; };
         //allow-query { 192.168.3.0/24; };
         };