Upcoming change to SOA values in .com and .net zones

Thu Jan 8 16:53:48 UTC 2004

On 8 Jan 2004, at 11:35, Owen DeLong wrote:

> I don't see any real reason for Verisign to do this, other than 
> possibly some
> lazy coding in automation tools (that SN is slightly easier to use as a
> timestamp in automation than one that is the encoded date).  It 
> doesn't provide
> the functionality they are striving for.

If they are going to do zone updates every 15 minutes, then that's 96 
serial bumps per day. They could fit that in the the two-digit nn in 
YYYYMMDDnn, but it wouldn't leave an awful lot of room for any 
additional ad-hoc serial bumps that might be necessary to address 
operational problems.

YYYYMMDDnnn exceeds 32 bits for contemporary values of YYYY, so that's 
not a viable alternative. YYMMDDnnn would work, but has Y2K-ignorant 
connotations (not that that's particular relevant, post Y2K). Using a 
second-counter from the unix epoch seems like a perfectly reasonable 
solution to me.

Joe