My zone serial number is messed up!

[Barry Margolin]

In article <94l2b9$7uq at pub3.rc.vix.com>,  <Mark.Andrews at nominum.com> wrote:
>> 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.

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

Every feature of a program requires "special code to be added and
supported".  What makes this one line so unworthy of that?  You must have
known that it was a widely-used technique, blessed as it was by Albitz and
Liu.

>> huge number, which their calculators probably can't handle.  Would Nominum
>> like to send out mod-2^32 calculators to every DNS administrator to make up
>> for this?
>
>	I've posted such a calculator numerous times.  You put the current
>	and desired serial numbers on the command line and it provides a
>	list of serial numbers.

I've never seen it, but that's irrelevant, since I could write it myself if
I needed it.  What's more relevant is that most DNS administrators don't
have it.  You could post it all you like and that wouldn't help, since most
of them don't read this newsgroup (or c.p.t.domains).

I used to be able to tell them simply, "Read page 137 of the DNS & BIND"
book.  Now that advice no longer works, and it annoys me that such an
incompatible change was made with little fanfare.

I'm going to ask our liaison to submit this as a feature request; that's
what we're paying you folks for (but even if you agree to add it back, it
probably means we won't get it until at least 9.2, and we haven't even
upgraded from 8 to 9 yet).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
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