DNS Negative Caching

[Barry Margolin]

In article <mailman.2601.1440783131.26362.bind-users at lists.isc.org>,
 "Darcy Kevin (FCA)" <kevin.darcy at fcagroup.com> wrote:

> What's in a name? :-)
> 
> RFC 2308 said that the use of the last field of the SOA to set 
> negative-caching TTL is "the new defined meaning of the SOA minimum field". 
> So you can *call* it "minimum", but it is *actually* supposed to function as 
> something else...
> 
> Eventually I hope BIND will conform to the spirit of RFC 2308 and stop using 
> the last field of the SOA to set the default TTL, as a "fallback" in 
> scenarios where the file would otherwise be illegal (i.e. the first RR has no 
> explicit TTL set, and there is no $TTL directive preceding it).  RFC 2308 is 
> so old, that if it were a person, it would be legal to buy cigarettes in some 
> parts of the world. It's long past time for folks to get with the program.

Does the RFC specify some other default TTL if there's no $TTL 
directive? If not, the software needs to do something, and using the old 
method for compatibility is as good anything else (on the assumption 
that anyone who didn't put $TTL in the file was depending on this use of 
the SOA record).

-- 
Barry Margolin
Arlington, MA