Why do people still use static addressing in configuration files? Fixed hostnames or worse IP addresses?

These things make one’s life a nightmare when moving from one environment to another e.g. desktop to QA, QA to staging or staging to production.

With each transition, one must wade through all the relevant configuration files, find all these addresses and edit them. This creates many an opportunity for error such as missing one configuration variable or mistyping an address. It’s also a nightmare to maintain accurate documentation for all these scattered settings.

And yet this is so unnecessary if one exploits the abilities of DNS (and maybe Bonjour) properly. Just look at some of the cool stuff one can do. Better still most (all?) of it is supported in BIND.

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