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

Thu Jan 8 17:37:22 UTC 2004

>I worry especially when I can not clearly see a benifit to either cat
>or mice.

The current serial number format supports a maximum of 100
changes to the .com zone per day. If you store your zone as
text files on a hard drive that is more than enough.

But! What if you consider the zone to be a database and
maybe even store it in RAM? In that case, you could 
update the zone every single time one of the .com entries
is added or deleted. The performance impact of doing
this to a zone stored in RAM is approximately nil.
However, the DNS protocol requires a serial number that
changes every time the zone changes. So the first step
is to change the way a zone serial number is created.
Then you deploy a DNS server architecture that runs
entirely out of RAM. And then when all of this works
smoothly, you start to increase the number of updates
per day until you're doing it every 15 minutes or so.
Then, finally, you go live with real-time updates.

In fact, with the speed of today's hardware and RAID
arrays it's probably worthwhile to do this even without
holding the whole zone in RAM.

Now do you see why changing the serial number would 
clearly benefit the cat? And can you see how this would
even lead to possible future benefits for many of us mice?

If you are going to attack Verisign, at least pick a weak
point to target with your attack.

--Michael Dillon