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Date:      Sun, 23 Apr 2000 21:42:53 +0200
From:      sthaug@nethelp.no
To:        james@targetnet.com
Cc:        leifn@neland.dk, yurtesen@dc.ispro.net, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: bind and the limit of serial number ???
Message-ID:  <58853.956518973@verdi.nethelp.no>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 23 Apr 2000 14:32:24 -0400"
References:  <20000423143224.C26932@targetnet.com>

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> > I once put in an extra digit in the serial number.
> > This made a secondary use a serial number, which was larger than mine, and
> > could probably be the modulus 2^32.
> > I had to call the hostmaster there (A "3.rd secondary" hosted at our
> > uplink) to get the zonefile removed, so the right one would be reloaded.
> 
> Just FYI: if you make the serial number of a zone '0', secondary servers
> (bind at least) will *always* grab the zone from the master.  It's intended
> to fix just the situation you had; set the serial to 0, leave it that way
> until all the slaves have picked up the new zone, then start using the
> proper numbering scheme again.  It wastes bandwidth for a while if you have
> a large number of secondaries and/or a low refresh time, but it lets you fix
> a type without human intervention.

This is a BIND feature, and should not be relied on. From RFC 1982:

   Caution should also be exercised before causing the serial number to
   be set to the value zero.  While this value is not in any way special
   in serial number arithmetic, or to the DNS SOA serial number, many
   DNS implementations have incorrectly treated zero as a special case,
   with special properties, and unusual behaviour may be expected if
   zero is used as a DNS SOA serial number.

There are better methods if you need to lower the serial number. The
standard method, which is guaranteed to work, is to increase the
serial number by 2^31-1 on the primary (largest increase allowed by
serial number arithmetic, se RFC 1982), wait one refresh period (then
the slave will have picked up the new serial number), and *then* set
it to the desired value.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no


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