invalid SOA record? or just unusual

Wed Oct 16 01:25:44 UTC 2013

Hello nanog,

Hopefully someone will have some input here on this DNS problem and
why it is happening.
I have just uncovered what seems to be a misconfiguration in an SOA
record. This causes the domain to be unable to be resolved via a few
of my DNS servers.
It seems to work everywhere else I check it just fine, except for
these two DNS servers.

One of these DNS servers is Win 2003 and the other is the standard
latest RHEL6 bind 9.8.2.blah-blah so I don't think it would be a bug
that affects both.
They are both behind a NAT Firewall gateway which could also be
causing problems by inspecting DNS traffic...

Below is the SOA record in question for the site that cannot be
resolved by our name servers.
Particluarly the "." in place of the authoritative server which seems
to be a mis-config and I am not sure the reason for it.

# dig soa rapportive.com

; <<>> DiG 9.8.2rc1-RedHat-9.8.2-0.17.rc1.el6_4.4 <<>> @172.20.20.254
soarapportive.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 33703
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;rapportive.com.            IN    SOA

;; ANSWER SECTION:rapportive.com.        3600    IN    SOA    .
hostmaster.rapportive.com.
2013041614 3600 3600 3600 3600

;; Query time: 54 msec
;; SERVER: 172.20.20.254#53(172.20.20.254)
;; WHEN: Tue Oct 15 16:49:57 2013
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 78

Thanks for any help, I would be grateful for any suggestions at all...
 Perhaps someone does the same thing with their SOA records?

DV