change the SOA

[Kevin Darcy]

Aleksander wrote:

>Hi,
>
>have some master dns records and their SOA is 
>"auto-generated-named.domain.com". The name is literally 
>"auto-generated-blahblah", this really sucks. We moved off that firewall 
>solution and now have the gateway running on a normal linux distro with 
>bind9. I'd like to clean up the records now. There's an IP change on the 
>way too, would be nice to clean up the records and lower TTL and the 
>same time.
>
>Would it be fine, if I change the zones to have the SOA to be 
>domain.com. and add temporary nameservers 
>"auto-generated-name.domain.com" which point to the new SOA? Will this 
>break anything? And then notify the registrar etc.
>
>In other words, if I change the SOA and let the old SOA name point to 
>the new one (NS record), will other hosts adapt the new SOA name? It's 
>important not to break the DNS for the hosts.
>
>Put it more simply, what are the steps when changing the SOA?
>
There are multiple fields to an SOA record. I assume you're talking 
about the first field, the so-called "MNAME" field. The only thing the 
MNAME is used for is NOTIFY and Dynamic Update, and only by default 
(i.e. the contents of MNAME can be ignored via "also-notify"/"notify 
explicit", and by "server x.x.x.x" in nsupdate). So unless either of 
those apply to you, I would just go ahead and modify the SOA contents 
much as you modify the contents of any other resource record.

                                                                         
                                                                        
      - Kevin