Too big serial - newbe, don't shoot please

[Simon Waters]

ajb wrote:
> 
> I've got a huge problem with an enormous serial number in one of my zone
> files.
> The number is many times bigger than any 32 bit number it's 500206071040.
> Now the secondary servers don't want to update their zone files, beacause I
> don't know how I should increase my serial no properly.

There is an RFC describing serial number arithmetic (RFC1982)

Check the archive, or www.deja.com, for "serial.c" if you need a
utility to help your maths.

You can use "dig" to grab the SOA mapped from the current big
text value to the correct range.

Other things being equal YYYYMMDDVV works well enough.