BIND problem

Kevin Darcy kcd at daimlerchrysler.com
Thu Aug 2 04:06:56 UTC 2001


Since I've converted all of my maintenance systems over to Dynamic Update, I
basically don't bother trying to impose any date/time-oriented structure to
my serial numbers any more. Not that this is *impossible* to do with Dynamic
Update (one could add an SOA-record update to the first regular update of any
given zone in any given day, I suppose), but it seems more trouble than it's
worth...


- Kevin

David Kirk wrote:

> > However I don't have that much sympathy for computer
> > administrators who when asked to give a 32 bit positive integer
> > get it wrong. Didn't they think it odd that "dig" gave a
> > different answer to what was in the zone file? A little bit of
> > practice at arithmetic will be good for them. YYYYMMDDNN is fine
> > for the foreseeable future.
>
> I realize that the standard convention for serial numbers is to use
> date, as indicated above; I've never been sure, though, what that
> actually gains you.
>
> The one requirement is that the serial number be an integer.  Why
> not start with 1 and increment upwards?  Some use the serial as
> the measure of the date of last change, but generally, in a larger
> enterprise, you'll have some manner of version control that you
> are using (or, at least, you should) anyway, so why rely on the
> serial.  In the UNIX world, for instance, RCS is a good, basic
> tool to handle file versioning, and it doesn't take much to learn it.
> If the content in the zone file is reasonably dynamic, using the
> date as serial seems somewhat impractical.
>
> It seems like using date as serial # - such as in the YYYYMMDDNN
> configuration as suggested - you are already set up much closer to the
> boundaries of what is valid, whereas using a much smaller integer just
> seems to make more sense in avoiding this pitfall.  You're less likely
> to violate the constraint, I think, working from a smaller starting point.
>
> I realize that there may be "religious" issues sparked up by these
> comments, but I'd definitely be interested to know why the use
> of date as serial number is so prevalent and recommended a
> practice.





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