DNS problem (forwarding order?)

[David MacMahon <davidm astro berkeley edu>]

I have Fedora Core 4 and NetworkManager installed.  When I use 
NetworkManager I experience DNS problems that prevent me from using 
NetworkManager on a regular basis.  Here are the details...

I am on a private network (10.12.0.0) with a DHCP server, a name server 
(at 10.12.0.1) that maps names to the private IP addresses, and a 
gateway (also at 10.12.0.1) out to the Internet.  My computer gets 
assigned IP address 10.12.50.12.  The name server at 10.12.0.1 maps the 
name "dhcp-10-12-50-12.dhcp.pvt" to the address 10.12.50.12.

Most of the time (when using NetworkManager), I am not able to do a 
reverse lookup on my ip address, but sometimes I can.  It seems as if 
the forwarders are not called in the given order.  For example, if I run 
the following three commands repeatedly...

# service NetworkManager restart
# md5sum /etc/resolv.conf /var/named/data/NetworkManager-named.conf
# host 10.12.50.12

...I can tell from that the md5sums that the config files' contents do 
not change from restart to restart, but the "host 10.12.50.12" command 
sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds.  FWIW, forward lookups of names 
on the private network (e.g. "dhcp-10-12-50-12.dhcp.pvt") also 
fail/succeed in the same way.  The command "host 10.12.50.12 10.12.0.1" 
always succeeds.

Here are the versions of NetworkManager and bind that I have installed...

# rpm -q NetworkManager bind
NetworkManager-0.4-18.FC4
bind-9.3.1-4

The NetworkManager-named.conf file that NetworkManager generates looks 
like this (I've masked the ips of my external DNS servers)...

// Named configuration, generated by NetworkManager

options {
        directory "/";
        query-source address * port *;
        forward only;
        forwarders {  10.12.0.1; <ip of dns2>; <ip of dns3>; };
        listen-on  { 127.0.0.1; };
        pid-file "/var/named/data/NetworkManager-pid-named";
};

// Disable rndc
controls { };

And the /etc/resolv.conf file looks like this...

; generated by NetworkManager, do not edit!

; Use a local caching nameserver controlled by NetworkManager

nameserver 127.0.0.1

If I change /etc/resolve.conf to...

nameserver 10.12.0.1
nameserver <ip of dns2>
nameserver <ip of dns3>

...then "host 10.12.50.12" always succeeds.  This leads me to believe 
that the forwarders listed in the named.conf file are not always used in 
the given order.

Is there anything I can do get DNS lookups to always work when using 
NetworkManager?  As I mentioned above, this prevents me from using 
NetworkManager.

Thanks for any insights,
Dave