sql server replication: Hy

I have one server dedicated as publisher and distributor and 82 server
configured as subscriber / PULL. It take me long time to configure all
this subscribers and now I am afraid what to do if this publisher and
distributor server someday completely fail (hardware or software error). I
dont want to reconfigure all subsriber to the "new" publisher-distributor
server, because this server name would be diferent. This would take me to
much time and i just cant afford that.

Off course I do backupus, but any way, what else can I do? Is it possible
to develop someking like fail over system? I am thinking about log
shiping? If this is good alternative, how will subscribers handle difrent
servers name while they will connect to publisher - distributor? Will this
work.

If you have any information or links about this, please help me.

Thank you.

Dejan
have a look in BOL for "Strategies for Backing Up and Restoring Transactional Replication" and "Backing Up and Restoring Replication Databases". As long as you are doing backups of Publisher db, distribution, msdb, master, you should be able to rebuild a server having the same name. The key is whether you use sync with backup or not. If you do, you are ensured that your distribution backup can never get ahead of the publisher backup (ie no transactions enter the msrepl_commands which haven't already been backed up on the publisher), and all will be well. However this will introduce latency (even using log shipping you can only backup the logs once per minute at the highest frequency, and this is clearly not ideal). If you don't use this option however, after disaster recovery you'll have to ignore some transactions and treat errors manually (info in the BOL article).
I personally haven't come across logshipping of all databases involved in replication as a means of failover and would also be interested to hear from anyone who has...
Regards

Thank you very much .. I will test this.