2009-07-21 - News - Chris Thompson
This should only be of concern to those who look at SOA serial numbers for diagnostic information. Up to now we have used the
<4-digit-year><2-digit-month><2-digit-day><2-more-digits>
format for the zones the Computing Service maintains. We are about to switch to using "seconds since 1900-01-01" (not 1970-01-01, because we need the change to be an increase, in RFC 1982 terms). This is part of the preparations for using DNSSEC-signed zones, where some SOA serial increases are imposed by BIND as part of the re-signing operations.
All of our zones now contain an HINFO record at the apex which contains version information in the old format; e.g.
$ dig +short hinfo cam.ac.uk "SERIAL" "2009072120"
We expect these to remain a human-readable version indication, although not necessarily in exactly this format.