Y2K and SOA record serial numbers?

icculus4128 at my-deja.com icculus4128 at my-deja.com
Fri Sep 3 16:59:21 UTC 1999


Hi all. Just a question that I've been unable to clarify in the DNS and
BIND books and by searching the web and newsgroups.

According to the docs (this is Bind 8.1.2 we're using), the serial
number in the SOA is an integer from 0 to 4,294,967,295. Currently, the
serial number for our domain is 99090201 (2 digit year to start) and
we've obviously got to start worrying about the year 2000 pretty quick
here!

Now, since the serial can go to 4,294,967,295 (accoring to DNS and BIND,
3rd ed.), if we go to a 10 digit serial (rather than the 8 we are using
now), we should simply be able to prepend the first two digits of the
year to our serial.

For example, I would like to change our serial from:

99090201

to:

1999090201

(and that should work just fine until the year 4294, it seems to me).

The assumption I've made, and have been unable to verify, is this:

Does BIND 8.1.2 assume anything about an 8 digit serial number? In other
words, is 1999090201 really greater than 99090201 according to BIND? Or
is it doing something silly like padding the end with zeroes (although
this doesn't seem possible, as 9909020100 would be greater than the
allowable serial number).

I just wanted to verify that this migration is what we should be doing
(i.e. prepending the "19" and then "20" to the start of the serial to
provide 4-digit years, without mucking with setting it to 0 to get the
secondary servers to reset).

I'm 99% sure this is right, but wanted to check with y'all...

thanks

johnS


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.


More information about the bind-users mailing list