[registrars] VeriSign intends to change the SOA serial number format for the COM and NET domains and also the ttl (fwd)

[Rick Wesson]

FYI

-rick

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 17:46:23 -0500
From: Matt Larson <mlarson at verisign.com>
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Upcoming change to SOA values in .com and .net zones


VeriSign Naming and Directory Services will change the serial number
format and "minimum" value in the .com and .net zones' SOA records on or
shortly after 9 February 2004.

The current serial number format is YYYYMMDDNN.  (The zones are
generated twice per day, so NN is usually either 00 or 01.)  The new
format will be the UTC time at the moment of zone generation encoded as
the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. (00:00:00 GMT, 1 January
1970.)  For example, a zone published on 9 February 2004 might have
serial number "1076370400".  The .com and .net zones will still be
generated twice per day, but this serial number format change is in
preparation for potentially more frequent updates to these zones.

This Perl invocation converts a new-format serial number into a
meaningful date:

$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1076370400'

At the same time, we will also change the "minimum" value in the .com
and .net SOA records from its current value of 86400 seconds (one day)
to 900 seconds (15 minutes).  This change brings this value in line with
the widely implemented negative caching semantics defined in Section 4
of RFC 2308.

There should be no end-user impact resulting from these changes (though
it's conceivable that some people have processes that rely on the
semantics of the .com/.net serial number.)  But because these zones are
widely used and closely watched, we want to let the Internet community
know about the changes in advance.

Matt
--
Matt Larson <mlarson at verisign.com>
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services