15 Dec 08 A BIND9 zonefile and commentary

I’m often asked for a copy of various zone files for Bind, that other users may use as a template. Here’s the zonefile for www.adamsinfo.com:

I’ll now cover each type of record briefly, and explain the ellusive decimal point.

The SOA or “start of authority” record indicates the domain name “adamsinfo.com” and the email address of the domain administrator “root@adamsinfo.com”, replacing the at symbol with a decimal point (this decimal point does not have the same meaning as those later on). There is only one SOA record allowed per domain. Contained within the SOA record is also a serial number, refresh, retry, expiry and TTL. The serial number is the ‘version’ of the zone. This is generally incremented each time the zone is updated. The refresh is used by the slave or secondary DNS server as an instruction on how often to update in seconds. The ‘retry’ is the length in seconds that the slave DNS server should wait before retrying to contact an unreachable primary DNS server. The expiry specifies how long until the slave DNS server stops responding to requests for this domain name, should the primary DNS server remain unreachable. If the primary DNS server becomes available again, the timer is reset. Lastly, the Negative TTL or ‘time to live’ value indicates how long the server will cache a NAME ERROR (NXDOMAIN) record. The longest permitted is 3h (10800 seconds).

On to the more simple records…
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Tags: a, adamsinfo.com, bind, bind9, cname, dns, mx, name error, ns, nxdomain, soa, ttl