Hi Lynwood,
As Ruben says - this was the point I was trying to get across in my last email - I am not criticising you, I am just curious to understand what you are trying to achieve as it does not make sense to me...
ARDC have setup four authoritative nameservers for
ampr.org and all the (now separate) reverse zones (ok, to be precise not ALL the reverse zones, as I said before we have a small number of delegated reverse zones - 5 or 6 from memory). Under normal circumstances NONE of these namservers need to allow AXFR / zone transfers to anyone, but as a few folks asked nicely I opened up
ns.ardc.net (which is the primary) as a favour, but only to 44.0.0./9 & 44.128.0.0/10 source IPs.
To reiterate, these authoritative nameservers are:
ns.ardc.net (UK based primary)
a.gw4.uk (UK based secondary)
ns2.us.ardc.net (West coast US secondary)
ns1.de.ardc.net (Germany based secondary)
As these are authoritative nameservers, best practice dictates that they are not also recursive nameservers.
If you, or anyone else wants to setup a recursive nameserver you are welcome to do so, no-one is going to stop you, nor do you have to ask anyone’s permission, but also you not need to get any special access to the zonefiles, as Frederic and others point out, you don't need to. If someone queries your recursive nameserver it will, by definition, recurse from the root servers down the tree to find one of the authoritative nameservers listed above to get the answer, your server will then cache that answer ready for the next time it is queried.
I hope that makes things clearer, but please, if I am not explaining it sufficiently do ask. It would also perhaps help me, and others, if you could explain why you want access to AXFR when it is not needed for a recursive nameserver (this is the non-standard bit I don’t get).