/etc/rc.d/named dilemma

[Nerius Landys]

I am trying to figure out why DNS lookups are not possible right after
the "named" process has been launched (during bootup).  I am kind of a
newb at diagnosing these sorts of issues, but as an attempt to figure
out what's wrong, I added the following lines to the very bottom of my
/etc/rc.d/named:

case "$1" in
    *start)
        sleep 5
	cat /etc/resolv.conf
        ping -c 4 127.0.0.1
        host google.com || true
        ;;
esac


And so, during bootup, I get the following messages, as expected:

Starting named.
domain nerius.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 ....
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp.....
...
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received...
...
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached


The last line is what I don't understand.  named is listening on
127.0.0.1, and normal lookups can be done fine after bootup.  Then why
can't I do a lookup right after named starts?

By the way, the underlying issue that I'm trying to address is that
ntpdate, which comes right after named in the boot sequence, is not
able to resolve the DNS for the time servers.

Thx.