TTL (yes I have set $TTL, I just didn't do it right!)

[Nathan Champion]

Hi,

After getting the message about having to put the $TTL value at the top
of the zone file, I went ahead and put in $TTL 432000 (on the ISC site
it told us to make it $TTL XXXXXX) on each of my zone files. I thought
that the number had to be 6 digits, which I later found out to be
incorrect.

Now that I have made a change to the zone file, does this mean I must
wait 5 days before other nameservers on the internet come back to reload
this information? Could someone tell me what the TTL actually specifies
(I know it means Time To Live, but how  and what does it affect in terms
of master, slave and caching servers? and how is it different to the SOA
minimum?)

Also if anyone could help with the following:

$TTL 900
@               IN      SOA     ns.blah.com noone.blah.com (
                2001020100      ; serial
                21600           ; 6h refresh    -    what does the
refresh do?
                2700            ;45m retry        -    what does the
retry do?
                1814400         ; 3w expire    -      what does the
expire do?
                900 )           ;15m minimum     -     what does the
minimum do?

Any help, much appreciated.

Nathan Champion

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