Changing raw IP to FQDN in connection strings

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Changing raw IP to FQDN in connection strings - any potential issues?

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torben 67322

Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2011 7:03 AM

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Our setup
I have a small hosting setup consisting of an SQL Server (2008), a couple of webservers and an application server. They are not part of any domain - just a bunch of totally separate machines (but on the same switch).

The problem
We are currently using the server IP in the connection strings on the web and application servers. This is not optimal in case the server crashes needs to be rebuild with a different IP (or for some other reason needs to change IP).

Possible solution?
What I thought I'd do is use a FQDN instead (e.g. sqlserver.mydomain.com). This has some potential issues:
- One more thing that can break (the DNS resolution)
- There might be a slight performance hit due to the DNS resolution (though probably theoretical)
- There would be a delay when changing the DNS-record due to TTL.

To mitigate this I thought I'd add the FQDNs to the "hosts file" which should be the equivalent of a NETBIOS name (afaik - not my area of expertise).
That way I would have name resolution that did not depend on an external DNS-server and the ability to instantly change the DNS. The "real" DNS-record would simply be a fallback for machines that did not have the "hosts" entries or e.g. had forgotten to re-add them after a hardware replacement.

Are there any gotchas with this method? (issues with Windows or SQL Server). Or is there a better way to accomplish this for our kind of setup?

Post #1202832

NJ-DBA

Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2011 8:23 AM

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Sounds pretty solid to me.

Post #1202943

torben 67322

Posted Thursday, November 10, 2011 5:19 AM

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Thanks NJ.
If anyone have tried this in a real-life production environment I would appreciate a short "yes - and it works" or "no - it ended in a major catastrophy" Wink

Post #1203423

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