im on linux RH8.0 looking to host my own dns for my website www.fake.com (for forum purposes)
i am able to setup ns1.fake.com and ping and do an nslookup on it. But when i enter www.fake.com i get nothing. But when i enter ns1.fake.com i get the webpage.

im using webmin now since im away from my pc, when i look at the fake.com zone i have nothing for the record file, can someone explain to me or show me a typical template on how the www.fake.com can come about?

thanks

Well, do you have an A record pointing requests for "www.fake.com" or "fake.com" to the ip address of the web server? Also are you doing these lookups between machines on a private lan? If you want the world to be able to get to your Bind server to resolve your domain name, you will have to register the name using your DNS server as the primary name server.

What do mean A record pointing to "www.fake.com"?
I want it to global so someone like you can access this site.
i have registerd my name server on network solutions as ns1.fake.com and ns2.fake.com

yeah but www.blah.com still needs to officially exist to anyone online. your domain registrar needs to be told where the www. subdomain is, it's not a "given" it still has to be created both with the registrar and your web server.

what is this registrar you speak of?

What he is saying is that your registrar now knows the location of the name servers that are authoritative for the "fake.com" zone. Now you have to create A records for your server name to be correctly resolved when someone types "www.fake.com" into their browser. On your BIND server you would create some entries in the SOA zone file for fake.com. Maybe like this:

fake.com IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (x's being your IP)
www.fake.com IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (probably same IP)

Then there are MX records etc. If you want to host your own DNS, that is a laudable goal, but keeping up with security and the fact that crackers love nothing better than attacking BIND servers, you might just sign up for something like Verisigns advanced DNS management. You simply create your host, MX, Cname whatever records and they manage and propagate them for you. That is cheap at $24 per domain. Good luck.