The DNS boxes are running RHL 5.? and forward to the firewall which proxies an external DNS server. can I revert to an older bind? a fully qualified name will work (eg piper.armfinancial.com works while piper does not). external names (which must be fully qualified) work okay. (eg www.yahoo.com works)
What's the search domain set to on the clients where this is failing?
Created attachment 4 [details] resolv.conf
for external hosts bind is doing a forward request. bind does not resolve out of the /etc/hosts. I think this is a misconfiguration on the bind server. I suggest you dump the named database and take a look at it (ndc help)