Disable Root Hints

[Eric Reischer]

Greetings all.  I have a private network that is not (and will not ever 
be) connected to the Internet, but I want to set up an internal DNS 
server to help navigating between machines.  I've successfully set up my 
domain (foo.com, let's say) root file and the server is answering 
queries to it dutifully, but I want to disable fallover to the 
root-servers in the event the local server cannot resolve a name (since 
they'll never be reachable).  However it seems that newer versions of 
BIND9 actually have the root servers primed in the program at 
compile-time, irrespective of the root hints file.

My question is, will it be sufficient to create a new root hints file 
that has [A-M].ROOT-SERVERS.NET all defined as 192.168.0.2 (my BIND9 
server's address), or will some other method be more prudent?  Will this 
create a circular reference?  My goal is to have the server return an 
NXDOMAIN rather than a SERVFAIL on a query to a host that isn't in the 
local table.  The other thought I had was to create zone files for 
"com", "net", "edu", etc, and have them all empty.

Thanks.