Updated successfully to miab version 71a however the admin panel now displays an error stating the Secondary Nameserver SOA is inconsistent. Infact there is a different email address for primary miab SOA and secondary linode SOA. I searched the forum and didn’t see any posts on this topic. I would prefer not to change the secondary SOA. Will this create any issues ?
AFAIK there should only be one SOA per zone/domain name, and to be honest I’m not even sure how this is possible, since the SOA record should be transferred along if zone transfers are properly configured for automatic zone transfers.
So ideally you only make changes in the zone file on the primary server, and then let the zone transfer protocol (AXFR/IXFR) do its job of distributing and updating the zone on the secondary nameservers.
If you’re not using AXFR/IXFR and have some other “sync” procedure in place, I think you should still make sure that the SOA record for a zone is identical on all nameservers.
Whether having different email addresses actually causes technical problems or is just not compliant with the standard, which it definitely isn’t, I don’t know, but to be honest I don’t see a good reason why you would want to have different contact addresses for the same zone.
The nameserver consistency check is meant to verify that the secondary DNS servers have correctly taken over all DNS entries. This check is simplified by comparing the SOA record of the primary and secondary DNS server. This can be done because it has a version number which is updated by Mail-in-a-Box every time a DNS record changes.
I wonder, did you enter or import the DNS records on the secondary server manually? If yes, then I assume you know what you’re doing and have correctly copied the records. The reported error will not create issues in this case.
If no, I would like to dig into this. If the SOA record differs, either the synchronization was not performed correctly (you can check the version number, which comes after the e-mail address in the SOA record) You should check why it was not perfoemd. Or for some reason the secondary server changes the SOA record. Also an interesting case
Manual transfer. I have done so in the past with no issues but clearly missed something here and should have done an import. Might just delete the secondary and start over with an import just to be sure its correct.
Thank you, this is very helpful. I’m going to correct the issue. I’d prefer to be compliant to the standard to avoid any potential issues.
Just out of curiosity, is there a specific reason why you are manually transferring the zones? Are you using external DNS, or is MiaB the primary DNS server for the domains hosted on it?
If the latter is the case, I wrote a guide some time ago on how to set up NSD on a VPS and use it as a secondary nameserver for MiaB. Maybe it will help you if you ever want to automate things.
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Is a momentary lapse in good judgement a valid excuse ? I’m using miab as primary and Linode as secondary. I did look over your guide and may take this route. Need to think on it a bit. I really appreciate you posting it here, Thank you!
Does Linode actually offer Secondary DNS? Could it be possible that you’re considering it to be secondary DNS, but it is actually acting as the primary?