stale copy of in-addr.arpa zone on ftp.internic.net ?

[Danny Thomas]

Perhaps a little outside the scope of bind-users, but at least it
is clearly dns related

For a couple of reasons we've chosen to run our name-servers as a stealth
secondary of the . (root), arpa, and in-addr.arpa zones. We had 2 choices
for the source of these zones
  * the f-root which is claimed will always allow zone transfers
  * ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/

We chose the latter. The files are normally updated several times
a day. As happens on the root name-servers, the serial number changes
several times a day, even when the other (non-SOA records) don't change.

Maybe a few times a year something goes awry with the process but my
attempts to locate someone who can correct the problem have not been
successful and I'm hoping someone on this list might know who to contact.
NB iit would be different if we were fetching the files from Verisign,
but maybe this site offers no guarantee of the files being kept up
to date, and they can't/won't do anything to overcome these glitches,
in which case maybe we should change to do zone transfers from the
f-root.

As an example, there is currently a problem with a stale copy of
in-addr.arpa with the following lines from an ls during an ftp session
(file permissions and some white space elided). At the end of the line
is the serial number from the file, and the serial number from
A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET in parentheses. It would seem the in-addr.arpa zone
file is stale by around 9 days.
1 root  root     680 Mar 22 06:33 arpa.zone.gz     2007032101 (2007032200)
1 root  root    2410 Mar 22 06:33 inaddr.zone.gz   2007031216 (2007032216)
1 root  root   18281 Mar 22 06:33 root.zone.gz     2007032101 (2007032200)

Danny

PS my previous posting analyzing root queries from our name-servers
  http://marc.info/?l=bind-users&m=114670093514442&w=2

-- 
   d.thomas at its.uq.edu.au    Danny Thomas,                                    
          +61-7-3365-8221    Software Infrastructure,
 http://www.its.uq.edu.au    ITS, The University of Queensland