How do I automatically connect my client to an ODBC data source on another machine with dynamic IP?

Posted by Kdansky on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Kdansky
Published on 2010-12-03T09:43:05Z Indexed on 2011/07/01 8:24 UTC
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At the customer's place, we've got a postgres DB on a server, and a few clients. We connect them through ODBC-drivers, and all machines run windows (usually XP). Now we had a few annoying issues:

  • The client "forgets" some flags in the ODBC drivers, such as ByteA as LO. Every time anything changes, we have to reset that, and type in the password, and sometimes even the IP of the server.
  • On x64 machines running Windows 7, configuring this is a pain as the system settings dialogue will only show 64-bit connections by default.
  • And most importantly: If the server changes IP because the customer restarts or replaces a switch, all connections are lost. Annoyingly, this cannot be fixed with just correcting the IP, but rather, we have to check every single place (even hba_conf) because all the settings magically disappear.

Our customers often are very small companies, where "server" means "that one PC in the other room", and not "Oracle mainframe in the dungeon", so we don't want to rely on them not restarting switches.

Is there a better way than to rely on these really unstable settings? Are these settings somewhere in a file which I could edit manually, to make fixing it easier?

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