Safely creating an alias for a server in DNS?

[SiD the Turtle]

Hi guys, our NAS box just went bang

We've got an app that relies on accessing a share on this NAS, but luckily we have a copy of this share hanging off another server. Problem is, it will be a lot of effort to hack the app into pointing to the other server so I'm looking for a method of changing the pointers for the dead server in DNS to point to the good server. In short requests to server1\share should be resolved as server2\share.

What I'm wary of is ending up with a situation where server2 ends up being resolved into 2 IP addresses, breaking apps that rely on it. How can I safely create an entry in DNS to fool this app into pointing to server2?

Edit: I should probably add we're talking Windows 2003 servers, domain and DNS.

 

[iaind]

DNS alias will be fine

However, depending on the NAS/server, it may not be as simple as that. If its a windows share, you need to disable strict name checking in the registry for it to work (google it)

 

[SiD the Turtle]

Thanks for that, a nice simple CNAME alias did the trick, but I did run into the strict name issue. The MS KB article that describes that registry fix is here if anyone is looking for it: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=281308.

 

[iaind]

Easy peasy

I would have found it and posted the link myself but I was feeling lazy and its not hard to find