webmin bind administration and date format serial in SOA

[Kevin Darcy]

Greg tokarski wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I am running bind 9.2.1 on solaris (8 sparc) and... throgh a
> neccessity for some other admins, use webmin to manage the zone
> files..... (webmin 1.030 + newest update to bind module)
>
> I have no idea why, but it does not seem to use date based serials!
> Even when I create new zone using webmin it gets a wrong serial:
>
> $ttl 38400
> test.com.       IN      SOA     pierson. g.cs.com. (
>                         1038947711
>                         10800
>                         3600
>                         604800
>                         38400 )
>
> Im my zones that I originally made by vi and scripts, I have for
> example 2002112605, well.. today 2002120301 would be used, yet webmin
> makes it 2002112606...
>
> I double checked a date_serial perl function in records-lib.pl and it
> seems to generate the proper number.. so I am totally lost why the
> heck it's doing it (or rather not doing).
>
> I am on the edge of really tinkering with the edit_master.cgi or
> whatever it'll point me to eventually, to fix serial update; but not
> in any way being a perl expert, before geting to deep in it, I
> wondered if anyone else had/knows of this problem, solved it maybe?
>
> Using webmin I guess I shouldn't care... but I just hate things not
> working right.... so.. please help if anyone has any ideas!

Personally, I think encoding timestamps in SOA serial numbers has gone
the way of the dinosaur. Dynamic Update, for instance, makes a mess of
such schemes. If you need a formal Change Control system for your
DNS updates, then use a real one.


- Kevin