Windows Server 2003 DNS serial number problems
Sunday, January 6th, 2008 by SteveI’ve been having a recurring problem with my Windows small business server 2003. Sometimes when I reboot it, it decrements the serial number of one of its DNS zones. This causes repeated warnings to be logged on a Linux slave DNS server:
Dec 3 06:53:49 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:03:48 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:11:26 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:21:24 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:29:18 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:37:54 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:47:10 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
Dec 3 07:56:11 drevil named[2765]: zone 20.0.10.in-addr.arpa/IN: serial number (61) received from master 10.0.20.10#53 < ours (62)
The solution is simple: Log onto the windows server, open the DNS management console, find the zone and click “increment” a couple of times on the serial number (SOA). But it’s very annoying, especially when the damn thing reboots itself every month for patch Tuesday!
It seems this was a documented problem in Windows Server 2000 (fixed in SP4): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304653, but I can’t find any reference to the same problem in Server 2003.