My zone serial number is messed up!

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Barry" == Barry Margolin <barmar at genuity.net> writes:

    >>> Great, but it was a useful bug that was documented as a
    >>> recommended procedure in DNS & BIND, which is considered the
    >>> Bible of DNS.  Was it really necessary to fix it?
    >>  Yes.  Because it would require special code to be added and
    >> supported through the life of BIND 9.

    Barry> Boohoo, a whole one line of code to recognize serial number 0.

That one line of code would violate RFC1982. I quote:

   Caution should also be exercised before causing the serial number to
   be set to the value zero.  While this value is not in any way special
   in serial number arithmetic, or to the DNS SOA serial number, many
   DNS implementations have incorrectly treated zero as a special case,
   with special properties, and unusual behaviour may be expected if
   zero is used as a DNS SOA serial number.

So instead of getting customers to read page so-and-so of a book,
point them at the RFC that documents Serial Number Arithmetic.