Archive for the tag 'SOA'

SBDavid
Oct 29th, 2010

Start of Authority (SOA) record

Start of Authority (SOA) record

The SOA record is the first record in a properly configured zone. It contains information about the zone in a string of fields. An SOA record tells the server to be authoritative for the zone. The SOA record takes the format.

Example:

domain.name. IN SOA hostname.domain.name. mailbox.domain.name
serial-number
refresh
retry
expire
minimum-ttl

domain.name - The name of the domain to which the SOA belongs. Instead of writing out the full domain, you can also use ‘@’ in the file to let the nameserver fill this out automatically.

IN - The class of the DNS record. ‘IN’ is an abbreviated form of ‘Internet’.
SOA - The type of DNS record, which in this case is ‘Start of Authority’.

hostname.domain.name - Also known as the ‘hostmaster’ field. It contains the e-mail address of the person responsible for maintaining the zone.

minimum-ttl - The default TTL (Time To Live) for every record in the zone. The default is only used when a particular resource record does not have its own specified TTL value. When changes are being made to a zone, the default is often set at ten minutes or less.