DNS - Year 2043 apocalypse ;-)

[George Ross]

In article <CT5d4.11$hP4.848 at burlma1-snr2>,
 Barry Margolin <barmar at bbnplanet.com> writes:
>... We use [YYYYMMDDnn], but nn
>is the time of day as a percentage, e.g. noon would be 50.  That way the
>script that builds the new files doesn't have to read the old files to get
>the previous serial number and increment it.  1/100'th of a day is about 15
>minutes; since our script normally takes longer than that to run, there's
>not much danger of it generating the same serial numbers on successive
>runs.

For the same reason (we don't want to have to look at the old zone files) we
generate serial numbers of the form YYYYDDDmmm, where DDD is the number of
days since January 1st, and mmm is half the number of minutes since 00:00:00. 
That allows us to generate a new file every two minutes, which so far hasn't
caused us any problems -- 2000005490 is our most recent.
-- 
Dr George D M Ross, Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
     Kings Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH9 3JZ
Mail: gdmr at dcs.ed.ac.uk   Voice: +44 131 650 5147   Fax: +44 131 667 7209
 PGP: 1024/B74A4F7D  14 E8 B3 00 20 04 68 F8  95 40 CB 36 A4 D4 FA 90