What is an SOA record?
The SOA (Start of Authority) record holds administrative information about a DNS zone: the primary name server, the responsible contact, the zone serial number and the timers that control replication and caching. Every zone has exactly one SOA record, and it sits at the top of the zone as the authority marker for everything beneath it.
What the fields in an SOA record mean
An SOA record packs several fields. The MNAME names the primary master name server for the zone. The RNAME is the administrator's email, written with a dot instead of the @ sign. The serial is a version number that secondaries watch to detect updates. Then come four timers: refresh (how often secondaries check for changes), retry (how long to wait after a failed check), expire (when a secondary stops answering if it cannot reach the primary), and the minimum, which sets the negative-caching TTL for nonexistent records.
How to read your SOA lookup results
IPeek shows the zone's SOA: its primary name server, the responsible contact, the current serial, and the refresh, retry, expire and minimum timers. Check that the primary name server matches your DNS provider. The serial is most useful for confirming a change has gone live — a common convention is YYYYMMDDnn, so a recent date means the zone was edited recently. Unusually short or long timers can hint at replication or caching problems. The minimum value tells resolvers how long to cache negative (NXDOMAIN) answers.
How the SOA serial controls zone replication
The serial number is how secondary name servers know when to pull a fresh copy of the zone. On each refresh interval a secondary compares its stored serial against the primary's; if the primary's is higher, it transfers the updated zone. This means you must increment the serial every time you edit the zone, or secondaries will keep serving stale data. Forgetting to bump it is a classic cause of changes appearing on the primary but not on backup servers. Most providers and tools increment it automatically.