Getting hold of serial numbers

[Barry Margolin]

In article <cpqkjk$15j7$1 at sf1.isc.org>, Pete Ehlke <pde at rfc822.net> 
wrote:

> On Wed Dec 15, 2004 at 15:57:04 -0800, Stephen Carville wrote:
> >On Wed December 15 2004 2:35 pm, D McDonald wrote:
> >> Earlier today Stephen noticed that the serial numbers on the zone files
> >> didnt match between my dns server, and thouse of att. How do you go about
> >> finding out the serial number of zone files? How would you do this from a
> >> *nix command line?
> >
> >USe whois to get a list of dns servers
> >
> Please don't. The DNS and the WHOIS databases are not the same thing,
> and there is no intrinsic link between the two. 

Why do people keep saying this?  The delegations in the GTLD servers 
come from the registries, and the registrars provide WHOIS servers that 
work off the same data that they send to the registry.

If you ever see a difference between WHOIS and a delegation, it's either 
because you caught it during a change window (the WHOIS database has 
updated, but the changes haven't propagated to the GTLD servers) or 
something is broken in the process of feeding data from registrar to 
registry to DNS.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***