I setup BIND running on SUSE 10 and configure the SOA file with the A record of the DNS server and some other configurations. On the DNS server itself I can run [HTML]host Darcidious[/HTML]and get a response. If I go to any other machine (Which I have assign the right DNS ip address) and try and ping any machine including Darcidious which is the DNS server I cannot get a reponse. My question is do I have to add the machine names and IP address of all the machines on my network including my windows machines as A records in the SOA file in order to be able to ping them?

Is the issue that you can't ping by name or can't ping by IP address? If you can ping by IP address but not by name then it likely means you haven't setup /etc/resolv.conf or BIND itself isn't setup properly.

/etc/resolv.conf should contain something like:

nameserver <ip address>

Where <ip address> is the IP of the name server itself.

I cannot ping by name and I do have the ip address of my nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf so it must be bind. When setting up bind do
I have to add all of my ip address and names of all my linux and windows machines in as a A record. I have attempted to setup a CACHE server and any DNS request that my server cannot handle it forwards it to my ISP DNS server. Help

Yes! There must be an address (A) record (and PTR record) for each host. Address records and PTR records can be added to a zone file either statically and/or dynamically via DDNS.

FWIW: I use DHCP to update DNS zone files dynamically.

so what I need to do is add these manually. So when you implement a new DNS server into an already existing environment then the admins add them statically,that is tedious. How does one perform a discovery of the nodes on a network to simplify this task. That seems crazy if you have several hundred host on a network. When I say nodes I mean internally and not a list of DNS servers from Internic. I hope everyone understands what I am asking. I have ten nodes in my home network, do I manually add all 10 names and IP address as a A record and a PTR record?

Then I would look at implementing DDNS. When a host gets a DHCP address assigned, the DHCP server can send an update (nsupdate) to your DNS server to add address and ptr records.

For more info and a good example config, type:
man dhcpd.conf

search for the chapter DYNAMIC DNS UPDATES

but for the time being I can just add the 10 machines manually right. thanks