Yet another newbie

[Kevin Oberman]

"Mario.A.C" <shertANTISPAMSHIELD at tiscalinet.it> writes:

> I've got a doubt that is driving me crazy;
> I'm running for the first time Bind 8.2.2 P5 under Linux , I've noticed that
> one of the "fields" in the soa record is called Expire Time ; now I'm
> wondering , what does happens when this time is finished? the zone is
> removed? Bind ignores that zone so a request will end in a failure?
> and how can I automatically upgrade serial numbers of zones that will never
> change?

If the zone has not been updated from the master for expire time, it
is marked as invalid and queries for this data will no longer work. But
this does not require changing anything.

Here is how the SOA values work...
refresh time....After a zone is first loaded or reloaded, this counter
starts and counts down. When it reaches zero, the SN of the master is
checked. If it has been increased, the zone is transferred. The
counter then is reset to refresh time and it starts counting again.

Retry time...If the attempt to either check the SN of the master fails
or a subsequent transfer fails, this counter starts and, when it
reaches zero another attempt is made. This repeats until a transfer is
successful.

Expire time...This counter starts after a load, reload, or
refresh. When it reaches zero the zone is declared invalid and queries
for data from this zone will no longer be responded to.

So as long as the slave can get the SOA from the master and can do a
zone transfer when the SN has increased, the expire counter is not
relevant. The SN can remain unchanged forever.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net				Phone: +1 510 486-8634