INTERNET-DRAFT Peter Koch Expires: December 1999 Universitaet Bielefeld June 1999 Recommendations for DNS SOA Values draft-koch-dns-soa-values-01.txt Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Editorial comments should be sent to the author, technical discussion is taking place on the RIPE DNS WG mailing list. See for details. Abstract The configuration and maintainance of DNS zones offer many degrees of freedom and thus several opportunities of making mistakes. Most DNS zones today are small and have to be set up and maintained by non- experts. This document gives recommendations on which values to use for the SOA resource record of small, stable DNS zones to aid novice administrators and to contribute to DNS stability end efficiency. 1. Conventions used in this document Domain names used in this document are for explanatory purposes only and should not be expected to lead to useful information in real life [RFC2606]. Koch Expires December 1999 [Page 1] INTERNET-DRAFT SOA Values June 1999 2. Background Various DNS surveying activities show that the vast majority of today's DNS zones is populated by very few hosts. In most cases there is only an HTTP server announced under the common name "www", sometimes accompanied by distinct mail or DNS servers or a bastion host. For many of these zones the configuration is touched once when it is set up and then left alone without modification for a long time. These recommendations are aimed at small and stable DNS zones. There are many legitimate reasons to use different values, e.g. proposed changes or special purpose applications. Administrators of those zones should consult one of the various more detailed DNS guidelines or books. Several other recommendations for SOA values exist [RFC1535, RFC1912], which are not obsoleted by this document but which have a different focus. At the time of their writing DNS zones were usually more densely populated and their target audience was supposed to have more interest in DNS. ISPs and DNS server vendors are encouraged to use this information for their customers [draft: once it has settled], in configuration tools or as default values. Additional hints for initial name server setup and configuration of this type of zone can be found in [DNSGUIDE1], [DNSGUIDE2]. 3. Recommended SOA Values example.com. 3600 SOA dns.example.com. hostmaster.example.com. ( 1999022301 ; serial YYYYMMDDnn 86400 ; refresh ( 24 hours) 7200 ; retry ( 2 hours) 3600000 ; expire (1000 hours) 172800 ) ; minimum ( 2 days) 4. Remarks and Explanation The values presented in the example.com SOA RR are discussed in detail. One main goal was to provide for fixed cut-and-paste values wherever possible instead of intervals to reduce the chance of operational problems caused by unfortunate combinations. Other values or sets of values will work as well, this is one set of values which reflects successful current practice with respect to scalability and stability. 4.1. The MNAME Value Koch Expires December 1999 [Page 2] INTERNET-DRAFT SOA Values June 1999 The DNS specification explicitly states that the primary master server be named here. The value must be determined and used. Especially it is a mistake to repeat the zone name here, unless this also leads to a valid address of the primary master. 4.2. The RNAME Value The RNAME is to publish a mail address of a person or role account dealing with this zone with the "@" converted to a ".". The best practice is to define (and maintain) a dedicated mail alias "hostmaster" [RFC2142] for DNS operations. 4.3. The Serial Number The most important issue is that this value be incremented after any modification to the zone data. For debugging purposes it has shown to be helpful to encode the modification date into the serial number. The value "1999022301" so is an example of the YYYYMMDDnn scheme and must be replaced by proper values for the year (YYYY, four digits), month (MM, two digits), day of month (DD, two digits) and version per day (nn, two digits). The first version of the day should have the value "01". It is important to preserve the order year - month - day. People using this as a debugging aid must, however, not rely on the date informnation, since experience shows that after initial setup maintainance of this value is often left to the auto-increment feature the software sometimes provides. Other schemes exist - documentation of which is out of the scope of this document. 4.4. The Refresh and Retry Values The refresh and retry values primarily affect the zone maintainer and the secondary service providers and may be negotiated between them. The values chosen here are aimed at scalability. Modern DNS software implements NOTIFY [RFC1996] and reduces the need for frequent SOA checks, as does the assumption of stability of the zone. While lower values would only slightly increase the bandwidth usage, they would increase the load on servers which are slaves for thousands of zones. 4.5. The Expire Value The primary goal is to ensure stability of the zone data, even if a mistake invalidating (non-authorizing) the zone or a network outage last for several days. A value of a week or two has proven to be way too short, so a longer time must be used. The specific value was chosen for aesthetic and historic reasons and to disambiguate between Koch Expires December 1999 [Page 3] INTERNET-DRAFT SOA Values June 1999 the different proposed values of "long". 4.6. The Minimum TTL Value There are two meanings for this value with practical relevance. First, it serves as a default value for the TTL of all RRs without a given value. To be cache-friendly this value was chosen to be two days, which also follows the stability assumption. The second meaning is the default negative TTL [RFC2309], which would call for a lower value. We are in a transition phase now with software implementing either of both meanings, so the TTL of one hour is recommended for the SOA itself, which will lead to nearly the same effect. 5. Security Considerations Filling in the recommended values will not directly influence security of the name servers for the particular zone, any system with a name in that zone or any other system in the Internet. However, following these guidelines will likely contribute to DNS stability and thus to reachability. Maintaining proper contact information in the SOA RNAME field helps people in reporting problems, although the address distributed there is not recommended as a primary security contact. 6. Acknowledgements This work is a product of the RIPE DNS working group. 7. References [RFC1034] Mockapetris,P., "Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities", RFC 1034, STD 13, November 1987 [RFC1035] Mockapetris,P., "Domain Names - Implementation and Specif- ication", RFC 1035, STD 13, November 1987 [RFC1123] Braden,R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Application and Support", RFC 1123, STD 3, October 1989 [RFC1537] Beertema,P., "Common DNS Data File Configuration Errors", RFC 1537, October 1993 [RFC1912] Barr,D., "Common DNS Operational and Configuration Errors", RFC 1912, February 1996 Koch Expires December 1999 [Page 4] INTERNET-DRAFT SOA Values June 1999 [RFC1996] Vixie,P., "A Mechanism for Prompt Notification of Zone Changes (DNS NOTIFY)", RFC 1996, August 1996 [RFC2142] Crocker,D., "MAILBOX NAMES FOR COMMON SERVICES, ROLES AND FUNCTIONS", RFC 2142, May 1997 [RFC2309] Andrews,M., "Negative Caching of DNS Queries (DNS NCACHE)", RFC 2309, March 1998 [RFC2606] Eastlake,D., Panitz,A., "Reserved Top Level DNS Names", RFC 2606, BCP 32, June 1999 [DNSGUIDE1] Liman,L., "SIMPLE DNS CONFIGURATION EXAMPLE", work in pro- gress [DNSGUIDE2] Koch,P., "RIPE Guide To Setting Up a DNS Server", work in progress 8. Author's Address Peter Koch Universitaet Bielefeld Technische Fakultaet Postfach 10 01 31 D-33501 Bielefeld Germany +49 521 106 2902 Koch Expires December 1999 [Page 5]