Controversial SOA values ?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <1502.946034694 at gromit.rfc1035.com>,
Jim Reid  <jim at rfc1035.com> wrote:
>I agree and disagree with this. It should be possible to get a master
>server back on-line within a week.

We have had customers who have been incredibly clueless, and could not get
their master server working properly over a period of weeks.  For instance,
one moved their master server behind a firewall, configured the bastion
host with "forwaders", and had us use the BH as our master, thinking that
it would forward the zone transfer queries.  On a few occasions, I've
manually "touch"ed the zone file on our secondary server to un-expire the
zone every week or two while the customer tried to get a new server outside
the firewall.

A couple of weeks ago a customer called us and asked if they could use us
as a backup MX server and if we could configure the sendmail retry timeout
to 10 days, because they were planning on shutting down their network for
the week before and after the Y2K New Year.  They're not running a primary
DNS server, but if they were, they would presumably need an Expire time at
least that long.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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