Question: I inherited an evironment that has a BIND server for our internal LAN. I noticed it doesn't have any forwarders for external request (i.e. google.com). How the heck does my laptop know that google.com is outside our LAN? My DHCP scope has the BIND server listed as it's primary DNS server.

Answer: 
BIND differentiate Forwarding (AKA Proxy) and Caching ( AKA recursive).   

Forwarding will forward queries to a **specific** target server and cache the result.   

Caching will query root name server and cache the result. 

In your case, BIND might be configured with Caching/recursive to do external lookup. You might find something along these line : 

```
// recursion is on by default 
recursion yes;
// the DOT indicates all domains
zone "." IN {
    type hint;
    file "root.servers";

```
Bind will be doing proper lookup from the internet's Root Servers -you don't really need forwarders as Bind is a proper DNS client.

If you wish to set up forwarding (eg don't actually look up any of these domains, just ask this other server about it) then the following might be appropriate:

```
 forwarders {
      a.a.a.a;
      b.b.b.b;
 };`

```

*where a.a.a.a and b.b.b.b are your other name server entries.*