I have client who had previously paid A to set up B.org which now has a page rank 3. A used a foreign company C and the domain is registered via enom. All the domain registration is with A and nothing really to link it to the client. Then after sometime the client realized that the company was foreign and asked for it to be "transferred" to a British company. The hosting was transferred to company D but the domain registration remains with C and there is DNS routing panel provided by enom, that routes the domain to D's name servers. At this point the client asked me to set up B.net based upon B.org with some other features such as actually being able to edit the website. This is done. However I have pointed out to the client that it would be worth trying to redirect B.org to B.net at least to retain the pagerank. I have had some contact with both A and C and of course some email conversation between my, them and the client. I asked to A to do a 301 redirect as a first step, but he said I should just forward the domain. Am I right that the enom DNS control panel is not enough to complete the redirect?

you need 301 to keep the ranking for sure. google should know that you moved the site. just to forward is not enough

"
From a search engine perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs. In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect."
http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/301-redirects-seo.html

Correct... I don't think enom can do a 301 (moved permanently) for you. All you need is a very basic hosting account to do it... perhaps the same account where your new site is hosted...

After consulting with webfusion I did the following:

* I set up a domain B.org from my control panel and put a 301 redirect in the .htaccess

* From the enom DNS panel I repointed the DNS name server to my VPS.

After several days this is still not working. If I do "nslookup B.org [my host]" I get what I expected. However if I do "nslookup B.org" I get

** server can't find B.org: NXDOMAIN

What I am doing wrong?

This is resolved now. What I had to do was use enom's default name servers rather than trying to forward to mine. Then I was able to do the redirection in seconds.

Forwarding could be different from Redirecting and as you have figured out, the redirects are used to move websites contents completely from one domain to another one. The forwarders could be excellent in case of having several domain names like .net, .org and .edu and then pointing them all to a main .com website.

That might be diffrent for SEO part only not for the visitors which access your site and being forwarded or redirected