start of authority


start of authority

(networking)(SOA) A type of resource record used by theDomain Name System (DNS) to give meta-data about a set ofdomain name data (the contents of a "zone file"). An SOArecord has the following parameters:

Serial: the zone serial number - a version number for the zonefile.

Refresh: the number of seconds between update requests fromsecondary and slave name servers.

Retry: the number of seconds the secondary or slave will waitbefore retrying when an attempt fails.

Expire: (time to live - TTL) the number of seconds a master orslave will wait before considering cached data out-of-date.

Minimum: previously used to determine the minimum TTL, thisoffers negative caching.