A Mechanism for Prompt Notification of Zone Changes (DNS NOTIFY)
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P. Vixie · 1996-08
Abstract
DNS NOTIFY defines a mechanism by which a primary authoritative nameserver can send an unsolicited NOTIFY message to secondary servers when a zone's SOA serial number changes. Secondary servers receiving a NOTIFY immediately initiate a zone transfer (AXFR or IXFR) rather than waiting for the SOA refresh timer to expire, dramatically reducing propagation delay.
Why This RFC Matters
Before NOTIFY, DNS zone changes could take hours to propagate to secondary servers because slaves only polled the primary at the SOA refresh interval (typically 1–24 hours). RFC 1996 reduced this delay to seconds by pushing a lightweight notification, allowing near-real-time DNS updates across the global secondary nameserver infrastructure. NOTIFY is now universally supported and is essential for operating reliable authoritative DNS with multiple geographically distributed secondaries.