Y2K and SOA record serial numbers?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <7qoup0$m5v$1 at nnrp1.deja.com>,  <icculus4128 at my-deja.com> wrote:
>The assumption I've made, and have been unable to verify, is this:
>
>Does BIND 8.1.2 assume anything about an 8 digit serial number? In other
>words, is 1999090201 really greater than 99090201 according to BIND? Or
>is it doing something silly like padding the end with zeroes (although
>this doesn't seem possible, as 9909020100 would be greater than the
>allowable serial number).

BIND makes no assumptions about serial numbers, it just treats it as a
number.  Things only get weird if you exceed 4,294,967,295, because wraps
around and interprets the serial number mod 2^32.

>Now, since the serial can go to 4,294,967,295 (accoring to DNS and BIND,
>3rd ed.), if we go to a 10 digit serial (rather than the 8 we are using
>now), we should simply be able to prepend the first two digits of the
>year to our serial.

Yes, this is the most common way to fix date-style serial numbers to be
Y2K-compliant.

>I'm 99% sure this is right, but wanted to check with y'all...

Consider this the other 1%.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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