Can Bind forward requests from within an authoritative domain?

[Eric B.]

Hi,

Maybe I am going about this the wrong way, so any help/advice you can give 
me would be greatly appreciated.

I currently have an external DNS with all my typical DNS entires (mail, www, 
ftp, etc...) for my domain (ex: domain.com).  I am now in the process of 
setting up an internal DNS for all my internal machines (we've been 
connection to machines using IPs until now). What I would ideally like to do 
is create my internal dns in such a way that if it receives a request for a 
name that it can't resolve, that it would query the external dns for the 
hostname.

So for instance, if my domain is domain.com, my external dns would resolve: 
ftp.domain.com, mail.domain.com, www.domain.com.
My internal dns would resolve my internal machine names: 
chocolate.domain.com, vanilla.domain.com, rockyroad.domain.com
I would rather not have to duplicate all the entries from the external dns 
onto the internal dns, but would like to be able to query the internal DNS 
for ftp.domain.com and have it resolved.

Is something like this possible?  I've tried playing around with the forward 
& recursive options, but can't seem to get it to work.  I set the internal 
dns as type master for domain.com, so I am assuming that it won't 
recurse/forward any missing requests to other machines if it fails.

Am I on the wrong track?  Is there a way to get this to work?

Thanks for any advice!

Eric