Rename DC

[Techie101]

Hi all

 

I have just replaced a win2000 sever with a win 2008 box. Everything has been transfered/replicated. The new box is working fine. Now I wanted to rename the new box with the same name as the old win2000 dc. The reason for this was that a lot of the gpo's and apps referred to the old box i.e unc paths \\oldserver\apps\ etc. Now I have renamed the win 2008 box but acitive directory has cocked up.

 

The dns has updated with the new server name. But is there any way of renaming a dc without messing up active directory?

 

Thanks all

[srochford]

In short, no :-)

 

The longer answer is that you don't rename it as a DC - you dcpromo it to a standalone server, wait a bit for replication to take place, rename it, wait a bit again and then dcpromo back to a DC.

 

An alternative is to just give it a DNS alias (so the actual name of the server is NewServer but you have a DNS alias which says it's called OldServer). If you do that then remember to disable strictnamechecking (Connecting to SMB share on a Windows 2000-based computer or a Windows Server 2003-based computer may not work with an alias name - I'm sure I did this yesterday!)

 

The final alternative (but it's too late now) is to never use server names for critical shares but to setup DFS. You then get things like \\\softwareinstall rather than \\\softwareinstall and when the server changes you just update DFS and clients magically find the new server.