wrong serial in SOA Record

[Steffen]

Hi there,

I have by mistake inserted a false serial in the SOA record. Usually I
use 10 digits for the serial, but now I made a mistake and inserted 12
digits.

Now my problem is, that I have a serial 7676545672 and usually I have
a serial like this: 2003031800. But this new serial is much higher
than my usual serial (the one with the date). I think it is allowed to
use only 10 digits and not 12. (signed int)

It is possible to create a new serial with 9999999999 and the next
serial will be 0000000000?? So I can do my 2003031800 serial after
this one?

Its a bit hard to describe my problem, but I hope you know what I
mean.

I just want to use my old serial number with date.

Kindly Regards

Steffen

[Gregory Hicks]

I did the same thing at one time in the past...

To solve it, I set the TTL to a very small number and waited for this to
propogate. I then set the correct serial number and restarted named.

When the 'bad' value expired, DNS propogated the correct serial number.

> To: comp-protoc...@isc.org
> From: newsg...@fh-weingarten.de (Steffen)
> Subject: wrong serial in SOA Record
> Date: 19 Mar 2003 07:54:53 -0800

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Gregory Hicks | Principal Systems Engineer
Cadence Design Systems | Direct: 408.576.3609
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San Jose, CA 95134 | Internet: ghi...@cadence.com

"The trouble with doing anything right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was."

When a team of dedicated individuals makes a commitment to act as
one... the sky's the limit.

Just because "We've always done it that way" is not necessarily a good
reason to continue to do so... Grace Hopper, Rear Admiral, United
States Navy

[Kevin Darcy]

That may or may not work, depending on what the serial number was
accidentally set to in the first place.

See RFC 1982 for a more thorough explanation of Serial Number
Arithmetic, and to understand the correct way to "reset" a serial number.

- Kevin

[Joe Kattner]

> Hi there,

> I have by mistake inserted a false serial in the SOA record. Usually I
> use 10 digits for the serial, but now I made a mistake and inserted 12
> digits.

> Now my problem is, that I have a serial 7676545672 and usually I have
> a serial like this: 2003031800. But this new serial is much higher
> than my usual serial (the one with the date). I think it is allowed to
> use only 10 digits and not 12. (signed int)

> It is possible to create a new serial with 9999999999 and the next
> serial will be 0000000000?? So I can do my 2003031800 serial after
> this one?

Steffen,

The easy way to solve the problem is if you control the master and
slave. If so, then you can change the serial on the master to a valid
number, and reload the zone on the master. Stop named on the slave(s),
delete the backup file for that zone and restart named which will
cause the slave to get a new copy of the zone with the updated serial.

If not, you can roll the serial manually. The maximum that a serial
can be is 4294967295, using sequence space arithmetic, which means
basically that half of space is higher than your serial and the other
half is lower, wrapping around at the maximum of 4294967295. For
example, using a serial of 500:

501 - 2147484147 Is higher than your serial
500 Current serial
2147484148 - 499 Is lower than your serial

Which may be confusing because normally numbers 2147484148 to
4294967295 are higher than 500. So to get to a lower number, you need
to increment by 2147483647 (half of the maximum), reload and wait for
the slaves to pick up the copy of the zone with that serial number
then increase to the number you want.

--Joe