Information older than the SOA expire period may also be purged. An IXFR server may optionally condense multiple difference sequences into a single difference sequence, thus, dropping information on intermediate versions. This may be beneficial if a lot of versions, not all of which are useful, are generated. For example, if multiple ftp servers share a single DNS name and the IP address associated with the name is changed once a minute to balance load between the ftp servers, it is not so important to keep track of all the history of changes. In such a case, server B can not provide incremental data from the unknown version and a full zone transfer is necessary.
Condensation is completely optional.
Clients can't detect from the response whether the server has condensed the reply or not. For interoperability, IXFR servers, including those without the condensation feature, should not flag an error even if it receives a client's IXFR request with a unknown version number and should, instead, attempt to perform a full zone transfer. JAIN-BB.JAIN.AD.JP. is added. 1995 Incremental Zone Transfer in DNS August 1996 One of the IP addresses of JAIN-BB.JAIN.AD.JP. is changed. Acknowledgements The original idea of IXFR was conceived by Anant Kumar, Steve Hotz and Jon Postel.