Hello,

One of the design issues I have been faced with several times is whether to deploy devices using DNS and reporting to a hostname, or to not use DNS and report to a numeric IP.

If you use DNS you incur additional airtime and add another point of failure into the system. However, you gain the ability to change the IP of a server without needing to touch every device and update it. You also gain some ability to use round-robin DNS and the like to do some load balancing on the server end.

I am curious to know how others have approached this issue. Horror stories due to the wrong decision would be very interesting to hear as well.

It has been my experience that using DNS is a good thing if there's not too much overhead from a data transmission perspective. If there's a reasonable amount of caching and the device is intelligent enough to manage DNS properly then it can save you tremendous hassle with larger deployments.

With a lot of "dumber" devices DNS is not even an option so we make certain we have the ability to remotely reconfigure the devices or pray that nothing ever needs to be changed

I'd be interested in hearing what others are doing as this decision is something you should have nailed down before deploying thousands of units to the field.