2000 Server Upgrade and Domain Name Change

[Barry Schneider]

I want to upgrade my NT 4.0 PDC to Windows 2000 server
and at the same time change the domain name for Active
Directory. Is this possible?

For example our NT domainname is company_inc. After the
upgrade I want the domainname to be company.com.

It is not clear to me by reading several nt server admin
books if this is possible. They all say that the upgrade
will upgrade the existing NT domain (does this mean
account and computer and/or the name of the domain?).

 

[Mark Mancini]

don't do it during!!! do it before!!!! and don't use .com use .local or pay
the consequences!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi Mark,

I'm in a similar boat, and I'm not totally sure what you mean.

Our current NT4 DCs have an NT "domain name" (nothing to do with the
internet); the domain name is "COMPANY". Sometimes I call this the
"NetBIOS domain name" for sake of a better word.

Our workstations, are "joined" to this domain (secure channel), but
their "domain suffixes" are "company.org.uk" and DNS is the real thing
out on the internet and "yes", you can ping them from anywhere at this
point in time.

When we upgrade our PDC, it will still be called "company" and we'll put
DNS on it (Win2k internal DNS). We'll then point all the workstations to
it for resolution, enable dynamic registration, and delete all the host
records from the "big" Unix DNS. However, we're planning to change the
"domain suffix" on all the workstations to something like
"company.local", but quite how this will interact with the "NetBIOS"
version of the domain, I have no idea! In fact reading back what I've
just written makes me think there's something seriously wrong with this
plan.

Can you elaborate on where you say "do it before"?