SOA Retry Value

The Start of Authority (SOA) record is a special DNS record that lists certain administrative information about the domain name and helps with coordinating zone transfers. Zone transfers are how a cluster of servers can coordinate on updating information.

The Retry value is the number of seconds that a secondary server should wait if the primary server fails to respond to a query. This number must be smaller than the Refresh value and the recommended values are somewhere between 15 mins (900s) and 2 hours (7200s). This test will only be marked as a failure if the retry value is shorter than 2 minutes (120s) or longer than 4 hours (14400s).

The primary server should have the capability of notifying the secondary servers whenever there is a change, making this refresh/retry process unnecessary. Depending on your DNS provider, is likely that you do not have control over setting the values of the SOA record.