We have a service oriented arcitecture (SOA) where we have business processes packaged as web services. From time to time there may be a need to bring an IIS server down to perform maintenance. Since this is an Intranet, in-house environment, the network team wants to modify the DNS server so that http://server1.mycompany.com will point to a different server while maintenance is being performed.

Is this the best practice for doing maintenance?

Hello,

Yes, it's not bad solution.

Regards

It's a suitable practice, though DNS caching may not allow this change to propagate immediately.  A better solution is a cluster or load balanced web farm where taking one off-line has no effect.

Jeff

I agree with both posts.

Couldn't you also in your workstations have a third DNS ip address which points to the new server. Then when you bring that server offline, your workstations wouldn't have to wait for a cache, because it would try the third ip in DNS settings which would have the ip cached already to the newer server avoiding the cache issues?

I haven't really seen workstations change DNS servers very well.  Usually it hits the first one and if it doesn't work (and nothing is cached), I've seen it just quit (throw up errors).