Ubuntu 12: BIND issue

[amplex]

I have been working on this issue on my ubuntu server 12 vm for hours. I got the zone file to read correctly by named earlier in the day then changed some syntax somewhere and could not figure out the issue so I used a web based PHP zone file creator and just plugged in a hosts file. This works, except for the raw domain itself. Other domains seem to work fine with nslookup such as google.com, amazon.com, etc.

I have a domain that has been pointed to my IP for months. I have no problem looking it up from anywhere, but the DNS on my server is not working 100%. I can query nslookup for all hosts on my domain (www.example.com, mail.example.com, etc), except I cannot query for the domain itself (example.com). Reverse DNS works fine as well. The last line is the one I added which doesnt specify a host but I thought might help resolve example.com without a hostname.



Here is the contents of my domain's zone file:

; BIND db file for example.com

$TTL 86400

@ IN SOA lateralus.example.com. amplex.example.com. (
2013012702 ; serial number YYMMDDNN
28800 ; Refresh
7200 ; Retry
864000 ; Expire
86400 ; Min TTL
)

NS lateralus.example.com.

MX 10 mail.example.com.


$ORIGIN example.com.

lateralus IN A 192.168.2.22
gw IN A 192.168.2.1
mail IN A 192.168.2.5

www IN CNAME lateralus
IN CNAME lateralus


Here is the output from nslookup:

root@lateralus:/etc/bind/zones# nslookup example.com
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53

*** Can't find example.com: No answer

root@lateralus:/etc/bind/zones# nslookup www.example.com
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53

www.example.com canonical name = lateralus.example.com.
Name: lateralus.example.com
Address: 192.168.2.22