Zone transfers are an archaic alternative mechanism for copying DNS information. The protocol has terrible compression and no security. Every new zone on the master requires manual reconfiguration of the slaves.
Zone transfers lose all information about client differentiation and scheduled record changes .
You may be forced to use zone transfers if your slaves don't support anything better. The BIND company occasionally mumbles about imaginary tools to handle new zones and client differentiation. By combining all these tools, you can finally approach the functionality of a trivial rsync script. I'd like to run axfrdns on IP address 1.2.3.5. to allow zone transfers to IP address 9.8.7.6 for the zones heaven.af.mil and 3.2.1.in-addr.arpa . The DNS server account name, normally axfrdns .