Root server cannot be a forwarder?

[Kevin Darcy]

yinzhang57 at yahoo.com wrote:
> Heard that on a BIND root server, recursion is disabled and it will not
> do recursion, therefore cannot be a forwarder?
>   
False. Recursion is not automatically disabled for a root server and a 
root server can have zone definitions of "type forward", which can 
provide recursive service for queries in those specific zones.

Whether it can be a "forwarder" or not depends on exactly what you 
expect to be forwarded.  A root server won't forward a query unless it's 
in part of the namespace which is either a) delegated from the root 
zone, or b) defined explicitly in the named.conf file. If neither of 
those are true, it'll consider the query to be in the root zone and 
answer on that basis. So this puts limits on its ability to provide a 
"general" forwarding service.

                                                                         
                           - Kevin