I made some DNS changes to my domains today with the last changes being picked up at the 15-minute interval of 12:30 PM, my time.

At the end of my updating session, I decided to click on the "Zone file" link for each of my domains in the DNS Manager's web interface and copy and paste the resulting text to notepad. I put the serial number in the file name and saved the text to files on my home computer.

Later today (about 4 hours) I was reviewing the notepad files and then looking at the DNS Manager's web interface and noticed that the serial number was different (incremented, went from ...2062 to ...2077) even though I hadn't made any changes since my last session at 12:30PM.

(1) Is this serial number incremented every 15 minutes regardless of any customer changes?

(2) Or is this just something the web application does in generating the zone file text and can be ignored?

Considering the zone file link is called "zone-render", it's a pretty safe assumption that clicking it triggers generation of a fresh BIND zonefile from the settings in the DB. Actually, I think that clicking the "Render" link available at the very end of a zone edit page (leads to same URL, I guess?) may even be necessary to apply your changes... not sure, but I always click it just in case

It's a real-time render, and doesn't get saved to the DB. It's not necessary to click it to get your changes queued up and pushed out.

Hope that helps,
-Chris

@rsk I wasn't clicking on "render", I was clicking on "Zone file", but going back in, it looks like they both go to the same URL: harness-zone-render-whizbang-do-not-click-me

@caker I suspected as much as I looked at my SOA records via dig throughout the day and found that they remained at the 2061/2062 serial numbers based on the last update.

Thanks for the replies.