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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Could you post a specific example that you had in mind, with a ‘before’ and ‘after’ for the configuration and what DNS would do to help?
I’d love to be able to externalize environment-specific configurations, but hadn’t thought of looking into DNS to help.
Also, if all the services are HTTP based, how would this differ from placing the service hosts or URL templates in a single XML file at one environment-specific location or even a localhost location (http://qa.mycorp.com/services.xml or http://localhost/services.xml)?
Hi Mike,
Will follow up on this soon’ish, leave me some contact details if you like:
dan at nospam dancres dot org
And we can discuss it over email….
Hi Dan,
I would also be interested to see some specific examples, as I have also always gone the ‘configuration via external file’ route.