Viewing the Start of Authority (SOA) information

An SOA record is an entry in the DNS zone file that contains information about a DNS zone and its records.

The Start of Authority (SOA) Overview page displays the Start of Authority information for the zone.

To view the Start of Authority (SOA) information for a zone:

1. On the site administrator Home page, in the Microsoft DNS area, click list zones. The List of DNS Zones page opens and displays a list of DNS zones for the site.

2. On the List of DNS Zones page, select
   the zone whose Start of Authority information you want to view, then click list records. The List Records page opens and displays a list of existing DNS records for the selected zone.

3. On the List Records page, click start of authority on the top action bar. The Start of Authority (SOA) page opens and displays the SOA information for the selected zone.

The Start of Authority (SOA) Overview page displays the following information:

- serial number. The serial number of the SOA record. This is generated automatically.

- responsible person. The email of the DNS server administrator. The email address is in Standard DNS Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) format. For example, the email address 'admin@wvh.com' is represented in FQDN format as admin.wvh.com. In the FQDN format, a period (.) replaces the @ sign.

- refresh interval. This value determines how often the secondary DNS server checks to see if its data is current. The server will make one SOA query per zone per refresh interval.

- retry interval. This value determines how often the secondary DNS server reconnects to the primary server. Normally, the retry interval is shorter than the refresh interval, but it does not have to be so.

- expiry interval. The period of time for which zone information is valid on the secondary server. If the secondary server cannot download data from a primary server within this period, the secondary server stops responding to DNS queries.

- minimum time to live. This value specifies the time other servers can cache data and applies to all the resource records in the database file.