Let us take a closer look at how to add a SOA record to Cloudflare and the necessary configurations with the support of our Server management support services at Bobcares.

What is a DNS SOA record?

The DNS start of authority (SOA) record stores crucial information about a domain or zone. The info includes the email address of the administrator, the last time the domain was updated, and how long the server should wait between refreshes.

To comply with IETF standards, every DNS zones must have an SOA record. Zone transfers also rely on SOA information.

Example of an SOA record:

name: example.com
record type: SOA
MNAME: ns.primaryserver.com
RNAME: admin.example.com
SERIAL: 1111111111
REFRESH: 86400
RETRY: 7200
EXPIRE: 4000000
TTL: 11200

The ‘RNAME’ field here indicates the administrator’s email address, which may be confusing due to the lack of the ‘@’ symbol, but in a SOA record admin.abcd.com is the same as admin@abcd.com.

As we have gone through the OSA record let us task move head to how to add soa record Cloudflare.

What is a zone serial number?

A ‘zone’ is a namespace control area in the DNS. A zone may contain a single domain name, a single domain, and many subdomains, or multiple domain names.

A zone serial number refers to a SOA record version. When the serial number in a zone file changes, secondary nameservers are notified to update their copies of the zone file via zone transfer.

Adding / Editing SOA record to Cloudflare.

When authority begins, Cloudflare inserts the SOA record. And using Cloudflare’s nameservers as the authoritative nameservers, there is no need to configure SOA records.

When we migrate the domain to Cloudflare, Cloudflare automatically creates the SOA record. If we want something else to be SOA, we must modify the name servers.

What else does a SOA record contain?

An SOA record contains the following items:

• MNAME:  The zone’s main nameserver’s name. This server updates secondary servers that maintain copies of the DNS records for the zone.
• REFRESH: The amount of time (in seconds) that secondary servers should wait before requesting the SOA record from primary servers to see whether it has been updated.
• RETRY: The amount of time a server should wait before requesting an update from an unresponsive primary nameserver.
• EXPIRE: If a secondary server does not receive a response from the parent server within this time period, it will stop responding to zone queries.

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Conclusion

To conclude we have learned how to add an soa record to Cloudflare with a few simple steps with the assistance of our Server management support services.