please help me understand!

[Simon Waters]

"Atkinson, Daniel" wrote:
> 
> If I add a new A record to a zone for which my server is authoritative, will
> this record be immediately available everywhere on the internet because it
> hasn't been previously cached? OR, do the caching servers know that it
> doesn't exist and answer accordingly...

Negative caching occurs when a caching server asks for the
record.

So if no one has previously looked for the record, it will be
available immediately.

If someone did try and query the record, their caching server
MAY cache that it does not exist for the duration of the last
field of the SOA record for that zone (Possibly limited to a
three hour maximum in some BIND implementations, others caches
trust the SOA to have the right negative cache TTL - mad fools).

Until you understand negative caching it is pretty hard to put
the right value in the last field of the SOA record, so might be
worth revisiting your SOA records as well.