I just want to confirm that this is a "bug" before reporting it to Bugzilla.

I started with the sample named.conf included in the distribution and found that I couldn't query my server from outside my LAN. I finally traced it down to the match expressions in the sample's external view.

bind-9.3.3-9.0.1.el5 /usr/share/doc/bind-9.3.3/sample/etc/named.conf

The view has these match settings:

match-clients { !localnets; !localhost; }; match-destinations { !localnets; !localhost; };

Changing these to "any" allowed queries to get in.

Is the ! syntax invalid for this version of BIND?

I don't see anything in Buzilla that looks like this issue:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=bind&order=bugs.bug_id