Serial number too big.

[Barry Margolin]

In article <d5grkh$274h$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
 Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> wrote:
> Not to take this off on a tangent, but why do some people invest so much 
> time and effort trying to use their SOA serial numbers as version 
> control and/or history mechanisms? Dynamic Update pretty much throws 
> that out the window anyway, and if you're *really* serious about that 
> kind of stuff, you should be keeping history, change logs, audit logs, 
> etc. in the backend of your DNS maintenance system; a serial number 
> alone isn't sufficient to reconstruct who changed what, in what 
> sequence, etc. anyway...

Date stamps in your serial numbers are useful for people who don't have 
access to your version control files.  For instance, any of us can do:

dig . soa

and find out when the root zone was last updated.  While this is hardly 
critical, it can be helpful to third parties.

It's also nice even for the zone administrators, if they happen to be 
off-site.

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