Renaming a Domain

[ITguy87]

Good morning folks!

 

We're looking to rename our domain. For the sake of argument, let's say my domain name is hq.domain.com and we are just looking to rename it as domain.com. We'd prefer not to add a UPN to simplify it. Our email domain is already @domain.com so I don't think we'll need to do anything there. Does anyone have any documentation on how to do this that talks about any and all changes to things like DNS, rebooting PCs and member servers, renaming DC's, etc.?

 

Thanks in advance!

[arricc]

You menton email, so I assume you're using Exchange. This basically means a domain rename is unsupported.

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738208%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

The domain rename operation is not supported in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 or Exchange Server 2010. DNS domain rename is supported in Exchange Server 2003. However, renaming of the NetBIOS domain name is not supported in any version of Exchange Server. Other non-Microsoft applications might also not support domain rename. For more information about other Microsoft applications that are incompatible with domain rename, see article 300684 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=185229) in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

[ITguy87]

Thanks for that article. Definitely has the information I'm looking for. Would I be better of proposing that we just add the new domain name as a new UPN suffix or would it be preferable to create a new domain and just migrate all of the objects to it?

[arricc]

Depends

 

What are you trying to achieve?

[ITguy87]

Basically, my organization replaced their Director of IT and she doesn't think that the hq in hq.domain.com is no longer a good representation of our organization given that all of our remote sites are in the same domain so she just wants to shorten it to domain.com. The priority here is visibility to our end users. Not so much that the domain has to reflect the name on our (meaning IT) end.

[arricc]

Is it actually visible to your end users?

 

We have one domain for our internal network, but use a different public DNS domain for all of our services so that they external and internal URLs are the same... eg sharepoint.company.com mail.company.com.

 

You can easily do that without renaming your domain. In fact our company.com domain is still (internally) attached to a legacy AD forest we're trying to decommission.

 

Look up split brain DNS.

[ITguy87]

Also, at second glance of that article, it seems to only apply to single-label DNS names which doesn't appear to be applicable in this case. That being said, I wonder if this can still be done.

[ITguy87]

I'm not referring to the domain name on the public side but rather to our internal users. Basically, my director doesn't want users to see the domain name as being hq.domain.com she just wants domain.com . And we definitely need a solution that won't affect our hosted Exchange (we're about to begin migrating users from Lotus Notes to Office 365). Both hq.domain.com and domain.com are verified in our portal so the change should be minimal, if not non-existent. It's the rest of the stuff that worries me.

[arricc]

can you give an example of how a user would see the HQ part of the DNS name?

[ITguy87]

Basically their username follows the format username@hq.domain.com and hq\username. We would like to change it so that it would read username@domain.com and domain\username. Thoughts?

[arricc]

By adding a UPN you can do username@domain.com

 

You won't be able to change from hq\username I'm afraid.