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SOA Record Lookup

whatsmydns.net SOA Record Lookup tool lets you query DNS servers and get instant results.

Start of Authority or SOA record lookups are used to determine the SOA records associated with a domain.

Looking for easier to understand results? Use the Global DNS Checker tool.

DNS SOA Record

SOA records, known as Start of Authority records are used to store meta information about a domain such as domain administrator contact details, the various times that data should be refreshed or retried after as well as when associated records where last updated.

Example SOA record

An example SOA record may look like the following:

Record Type MNAME RNAME Serial Refresh Retry Expire TTL
example.com SOA ns1.nameserver.com admin.example.com 123456789 86400 7200 3600000 3600

example.com represents the domain of the record.

SOA is the record type.

ns1.nameserver.com is the MNAME value of the record. This is the primary master nameserver.

admin.example.com is the RNAME value of the record. This is the email address of the person or company responsible for managing this domain. The first . from the value should be replaced with an @ so the contact address in this example would be [email protected].

123456789 is the Serial number for this record. If this number number increases in value from previous updates then this indicates that the domains records should be updated. A common practice is to use the current date and time in the format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.

86400 is the Refresh time of the record in seconds, this example represents 24 hours. This is the time in which secondary nameservers should query the master nameserver to check for updates.

7200 is the Retry time of the record in seconds, this example represents 2 hours. This is the time in which secondary nameservers should retry querying the master nameserver if it does not respond. This value must be less than the Refresh value.

3600000 is the Expire time of the record in seconds, this example represents 1000 hours. This is the time in which secondary nameservers should stop responding for this domain if the master nameserver has not responded for. This value must be greater than the value of Refresh and Retry values combined.

3600 is the TTL (time to live) of the record in seconds, this example represents 1 hour. This means that when a record has had updates made to it, then it will take 1 hour to update.