AD and DNS

[Steven]

All our NT4 clients currently have a DNS suffix of
abc.co.uk. We will be doing an in place upgrade to Active
Directory and the new domain name will be abc.com.

How should the clients DNS suffix be configured? Will they
still work after the upgrade if the suffix is kept the
same (If they use WINS) or should the DNS suffix be
changed?

New XP/2000 clients will obviously have the new domain
name as their suffix.

 

[Ray Lava [MSFT]]

Steven,

Once your domain is upgraded from NT4 to Windows 2000, you will have two
different domain names. One will be the netbios domain name that you are
currently using and the other will be your new Windows 2000 domain name of
abc.com. The NT4 clients will still use the netbios name when logging into
the domain and for authentication. You should not have any problems with
leaving your DNS suffix unchanged for the NT4 clients since they do not use
DNS for logging on. Your WINS server keeps track of netbios names on your
domain so no changes need to be made there. The DNS suffix will be
irrelevant to WINS.

If you want them to use the correct DNS suffix for DNS queries, then I would
change their DNS suffix to match your new DNS domain name of abc.com.

I hope this answers your question.

Ray Lava
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights