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from The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
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   <networking> (SOA) A type of {resource record} used by the
   {Domain Name System} (DNS) to give meta-data about a set of
   domain name data (the contents of a "zone file").  An SOA
   record has the following parameters:

   Serial: the zone serial number - a version number for the zone
   file.

   Refresh: the number of seconds between update requests from
   secondary and slave name servers.

   Retry: the number of seconds the secondary or slave will wait
   before retrying when an attempt fails.

   Expire: (time to live - TTL) the number of seconds a master or
   slave will wait before considering cached data out-of-date.

   Minimum: previously used to determine the minimum TTL, this
   offers negative caching.

   (2007-05-11)