how to change the serial number usinf nsupdate

[Martin McCormick]

/dev/rob0 writes:
>I suppose you could just change the SOA record. Never tried it myself, 
>but I can't see why not.

	Yes.  You can do that, but you must re-write the whole SOA
record and change only your serial number.  Having said that, you will
need to have a cron job to run at Midnight to force a new serial
number.  It's a bit dicy.  What if, for instance, you set 2005080100
and it's a busy day and you get 99 updates which isn't that far
fetched.  You've now got 2005080199 which will turn in to 2005080200
on the next update.  It's 8 or 9 in the evening and you pass
2005080200 and maybe hit 2005080225 when your trusty little script
runs at 0:00 and kicks your serial number back to 2005080200.  Your
slaves will miss out on the next 25 updates which I am sure is not
what you wanted to happen.  The DNS doesn't care if those digits line
up to define the date or not so all that it will see is that the
serial number rolled back.  One could take that in to account in the
script, but things could get out of hand quickly on a busy site.  I
have seen some Windows systems get unhappy with the world and want to
run Linux or something:-) and buzz through over a hundred serial
numbers in a day, heck, an hour if they get really diss enchanted with
their dhcp registration for some reason.

	So, the answer is yes you can do that.  The question is, do
you really want to?

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group