title: How to read a DNS SOA record?
body: <p>I'm having some trouble reading SOA records. I get the following response after using <code>dig</code> to fetch the SOA record of a domain I'm in control of.</p>
  
  <pre><code>SOA ns1.example.com. xxx.gmail.com. 2013041357 14400 14400 1209600 86400
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How am I supposed to know which value is associated with each field? According to <a href="http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch8/soa.html" rel="noreferrer">this article</a> a SOA record can have nine fields. </p>
  
  <p>I am imagining that each space signifies the end of a value and I can see that the second value is the email address. But how would I determine which is the refresh value and which is the retry value? They're just numbers with no field names next to them!</p>
  
  <p>Am I missing something here? Thanks in advance.</p>