Given an RPM installation on Fedora 4/5, you should be able to start the services directly from the usual applets or command-line tools (review service management tools if necessary).
Starting named:
/etc/init.d/named start
Configuring named to start in runlevels 3, 4, and 5:
chkconfig named on
or use the terminal-based ntsysv:
ntsysv
At the simplest level, these three commands let you see if bind is working:
host local_domain_host’s_name
Run this command against a local hostname, and you should get a message telling you what IP address that host has.
dig yourdomainname.com
Run this command against your own domain name, and you should get a lengthy printout of your domain’s information, including name servers.
nslookup -sil www.yourdomainname.com
And finally, nslookup (run with the -sil or “silent” option to suppress a silly warning message) should return the IP address of the server providing www.yourdomainname.com.