dnsproblenm

Nov 24 2009

The Serial typo

Serge pinged me today over Jabber asking hot to tackle an accidental typo in the serial number of a zonefile.

  1. dig +short SOA ibbt.be
  2. dns1.ibbt.be. admin.ibbt.be. 2009141017 7200 3600 1209600 432000

No really we don't need no 13th and 14th month. Given the fact that lots of us use the YYYYMMDDID format That would mean that we'd have to wait for 20100101 to happen before we can update in a readable fashion again ..

Serge then looked some further and found this article which documents a nice solution for a quick fix of the problem


First, add 2147483647 to the erroneous value, for example, 2008022800 + 2147483647 = 4155506447, restart BIND or reload the zone, and make absolutely sure the zone has transferred to all the slave servers. Second, set the SOA serial number for the zone to the correct value and restart BIND or reload the zone again. The zone will transfer to the slave because the serial number has wrapped through zero and is therefore greater that the previous value of 4155506447!

Oh and the twitter hashtag is #dnsproblem fwiw :)