Faster zone transfer/less traffic

[Terrence Koeman]

Hello list,

I think someone here can help me.

I have a particular zone that is about 20Mb on disk, the zone has a refresh
interval of 1 hour. The zone usually changes within the refresh interval.

This zone needs to be transferred between the master in the USA and a slave
in The Netherlands, and the connection between them is not ideal. At the
moment the transfer takes about 40 minutes, so the slave is pulling the zone
almost all the time. In many cases the transfer times out and is restarted
from the beginning.

How can I improve this with BIND (master and slave both running BIND)?

I saw something about IXFR, but I can hardly find any documentation about
it. I'm guessing that IXFR only transfers the changes in the zone instead of
the whole zone. Is this true? And if yes, what versions of BIND support it
and how is it turned on?

Another thing, I tried compressing the zone and it compresses down to less
than a Mb. Does BIND have support for compressed zone transfers?

Thanks in advance!

--
Regards,

Terrence Koeman

Technical Director/Administrator
MediaMonks B.V. (www.mediamonks.nl)

Please quote all replies in correspondence.