With regards to #1, I changed the A record in DNS and splunk never resolves it again. It requires a reboot to updates resolution. With tcpout, you can set dnsresolutioninterval , but not with syslog:
Invalid key in stanza [syslog:mysyslog] in /opt/splunk/etc/system/local/outputs.conf, line 13: dnsresolutioninterval (value: 300)
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