SOA and trailing dot

[Jens Kristian Søgaard]

Johnny Fribert Lauridsen <jlaurids at cisco.com> writes:

> xxx.dk.                       SOA    abc.xxx.dk . (132 3600 300 172800 7200)
>   xxx.dk.                       NS     abc  

> 1. What is the significant thing about not having the trailing dot '.' on the abc.xxx.dk in the SOA?

The significant thing about not having a trailing dot in your zonefile
is, that the default origin is appended to the name. This means that
in your example, you have actually specified the primary name server
to be:

        abc.xxx.dk.xxx.dk.


> 2. Also, is it fully valid to only have a dot for the contact info? 

It's a bad idea, I would say. It doesn't prevent your server from
functioning right here and now -- but it would be harder to find the
contact info, if someone discover a subtle error somewhere. But then,
contact info is listed in the whois database anyways.

> 3. The SOA is listed twice.  Is this significant, and why/how?

It's just because of the way, that nslookup does the actual lookup. In
reality there is ofcourse only one SOA-record - and if you look in the
actual zonefile, you'll only see one listed.


-- 
Jens Kristian Søgaard,
jk at soegaard.net -- http://www.jksoegaard.dk/
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