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From: karl.kleinpaste@osc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains
Subject: Re: decimals in the serial field
Message-ID: <1991Jun13.165341.22460@oar.net>
Date: 13 Jun 91 17:51:29 GMT
References: <1991Jun13.161911.29541@ssd.kodak.com>
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Organization: Viento Gigabit Testbed, Ohio Supercomputer Center
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dcox@ssd.kodak.com writes:
   ssd.kodak.com.  IN    SOA     ispdgate.ssd.kodak.com. dcox.ssd.kodak.com. (
				 32.1  ; Serial
				 1800    ; Refresh every 30 minutes
				 300     ; Retry every 5 minutes
				 604800  ; Expire after one week
				 3600 )  ; Minimum

The fundamental problem is that dotted numbers aren't supposed to be
in the SOA serial # field.  From RFC 1035, section 3.3.13, page 19:

SERIAL          The unsigned 32 bit version number of the original copy
                of the zone.  Zone transfers preserve this value.  This
                value wraps and should be compared using sequence space
                arithmetic.

Any conversion of a dotted number to "unsigned 32 bit" is probably
implementation-dependent, and almost certainly wrong.

I use a YYMMDD encoding, e.g., 910123 means that I last updated the
zone last January 23rd.

"When in doubt, quote an RFC." --Ed Vielmetti

--karl