Named DNS question

Please help out a DNS/Bind newbie--

I am trying to configure bind 9 on a bare RH7.1 box at work for our
development vlan. The vlan is not accessible from the outside, and this
will be the only DNS server in it. Do I have to configure a named.ca file?
Everytime I start without the cache file defined at all (root="."), named
starts up and then shuts down. Should I set-up the .ca file to point to the
dns server itself?

Thanks in advance for any help
Bob