SOA record (Start of Authority)

The single record at the top of every zone that stores its authority metadata: primary server, admin contact, a serial number, and the timers that govern secondary-server synchronisation.

What it stores

Every zone has exactly one SOA record. It names the primary name server and admin email, and carries a serial number plus refresh, retry, expire and minimum-TTL timers that control how secondary servers replicate the zone.

ZONE FILE

example.com. IN SOA ns1.provider.net. admin.example.com. (
  2026070101 ; serial
  7200       ; refresh
  3600       ; retry
  1209600    ; expire
  3600 )     ; minimum TTL

Why it matters

The serial number tells secondaries when to pull zone updates; forgetting to bump it stalls propagation.
The timers govern replication resilience across name servers.

Common mistakes

Editing zone records but not incrementing the SOA serial, so secondaries never refresh.
Setting an unreasonably long expire that keeps stale data alive during an outage.

How WebInspect checks this

The Network Inspector reports the SOA record and its serial and timer values.