RFC 1034 / AUTHORITY

Zone maintenance

An authoritative secondary checks whether its zone copy has changed and retrieves a replacement when needed.

Related RFCs and changes

“Updates” changes part of an earlier RFC. “Obsoletes” replaces it. This list shows selected related documents.

RFC 1034 · § 4.3.5EXAMPLE

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Serve from the refreshed copy.

Both primary and secondary hold authoritative data, unlike an ordinary resolver cache.

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KEY POINT

Refresh authority independently of caches.

The SOA serial identifies a zone revision.
Secondaries poll according to SOA refresh and retry timing.
After the SOA expiry interval without successful refresh, a secondary must stop serving the stale zone as authoritative.

DETAILS

The original transfer model copies a zone using AXFR. Later RFCs add mechanisms such as NOTIFY and incremental transfer; those are extensions.

Diagrams simplify the RFC. Read the linked sections for complete requirements.

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