question about serial numbers

[Bill Larson]

In article <T75e3.1003$KM3.238757 at burlma1-snr2>,
Barry Margolin  <barmar at bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>In article <37782066.CA1DBAEB at uta.edu>, Craig Dupree  <cdupree at uta.edu> wrote:
>>Patrick Greenwell wrote:
>>> DNS will care if you roll over from "99123101" to "00010101".
>>
>>It won't when I restart the daemon, minutes after I make this change.  
>
>That's fine if you have enough control of the slave servers.  Many people
>don't have the luxury of being able to restart their slave servers whenever
>they want (often they're at the ISP).

You may also be unable to restart a daemon that is running on a stealth
server.  In fact, as the operator of the master server, you may not
even be aware of the existance of a stealth slave.

The multistep process to re-sync a serial number should even function
against a stealth server.  This is the "correct" solution to decrementing
the serial number on a name server.  Is this a correct assumption?

I think the outcome of this whole discussion should be use a serial
number scheme that doesn't have a rollover problem.  And if you do have
a rollover problem, correct it soon.

Bill Larson (wllarso at swcp.com)