zone can be scavenged after 01/01/1601 in server 2003 DNS

I have enabled scavenging and aging at both the server and zone level for an
active-directory integrated zone.

In zone/aging scavenging properties it says "zone can be scavenged after
01/01/1601 00:00:00"

this is probably a naive question, but why 1601?

Regards Anastas.

It's an epoch. It's the first year of the 400-year cycle in the
Gregorian calendar which we were in when Windows NT was first created.

Essentially it's an arbitrary date chosen as a starting point for
calculating a number of different fields which are not stored as dates
themselves.

For the value you're looking at, Available for Scavenging Time, it's
stored as the number of hours since the epoch. And in your case, the
value is 0 (uninitialised).

When it's operational it means the next time your zone can be scavenged.
On first configuration that'll be the current date plus the value of the
refresh interval. It's extended by the Automatic Scavenging Interval
there-after.

It's also used for calculating lastLogon, and lastLogonTimeStamp and
number of other fields in AD. For DNS it's used to figure out the one
you mention as well as the record TimeStamp.

HTH

Chris

I think you must have hit my blog a few times looking for an answer to
this tonight. Lots of hits with the search term as "why zone scavenged
after 01/01/1601".

Sorry you didn't find the answer there, never figured anyone would want
to know

Chris

Hi Chris,

The hits on your blog must have been me.

Your explanation of the 400 year Windows NT epoch is very interesting. I
will look into this further when I have time. Could you post a link to your
blog here for me? I googled so extensively tonight tracking it down could be
exhausting!

I found the following solution to my problem at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832020 the hotfix download is for server
2000 but it worked for my Server 2003 DNS server. 'The zone can be
scavenged' is now set to 09/03/2010 after running the hotfix and a restart.

Thanks very much for your time, Anastas


"Chris Dent" <> wrote in message
news:...
>I think you must have hit my blog a few times looking for an answer to this
>tonight. Lots of hits with the search term as "why zone scavenged after
>01/01/1601".
>
> Sorry you didn't find the answer there, never figured anyone would want to
> know
>
> Chris