Thanks for your comment Paul
The thing is, when bind chroots, it should have writeable access to its
own /var/named, which as far as the host is concerned, is actually
/var/named/chroot/var/named.
its needs to know where to load its zone information from, ie.
/var/named, then chroots.
I cant see how that should be a problem for bind to write to its own
/var/named directory. Anyway I tried it, and changed options directory
/var/named to /var/named/slaves .... naturally, bind couldnt find zone
information ...
I suspect there is something more intriguing afoot.
Thanks anyway :)