Over on the bind-users at lists.isc.org list, I am in a discussion about building the named.zone file, as Centos 6.3 does not provide it. It DOES provide a named.ca which is already old (wrt AAAA records) compared to the named.zone provided by internic. A few contributors have stated that now the hints are built into bind and you can see this with: strings /usr/local/sbin/named | grep A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET Well it looks like Centos has it at /usr/sbin/named and there are no such strings in there. Oh, these hints come from "lib/dns/rootns.c in the source code tree". So are the hints built in here?