I have a client with a 5 server farm that is used for their external production farm. 2 WFE's and 1 index are in the DMZ with a SQL cluster in the interal domain with 1433 opened in in the firewall for DB access. I have setup sql client aliasing on the sharepoint servers (command line cliconfg.exe) pointing the database cluster (tcp, 1433, clustername.company.com ) . I'm having some pretty consistent connection issues from the farm where i'll get the ugly white page that says it can't connect to the configuration database, however the database servers are running fine. An iisreset seems to remedy the issue and gets the sites running again. I've poured through the event logs and the SharePoint logs and can't seem to find anything that really throws up a red flag to me. I created a simple console app that tries to estable a sql connection every 5 minutes using the sql alias. I can see in the logs that it produces that it will establish a connection just fine for a few hours and then randomly have issues for the next few hours and then remedy itself again. This is what is making me suspect the sql client alias as the culprit. I have tried updating the sql native client drivers on the WFE's to the latest and greatest but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Anyone else experience weird issues with SQL Client aliasing? Any other ports besides 1433 that I need to be worried about due to sql client aliasing? Should I be looking somewhere else for errors?Tony Testa www.tonytestasworld.com

Random thoughts:How are you resolving the cluster name from the DMZ based servers? DNS? Host file?How is the firewall rule configured - is it closing the port if it sees no traffic for a while, or something?You mention a 5 server farm - so you have 3 in the DMZ - where are the other 2, and do they have issues? Do they use aliasing?Rob