Moving from NT to 2003 w/AD

  • Thread starter Thread starter dp
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dp

Hi. I'm trying to convert our organization from using Windows NT as it's
primary domain controller, to using a nifty new Windows 2003 server box I
bought from Dell. I already had the rest of the network setup, running
pretty good. Others servers were (and still are used) for internet gateway,
file services (smb via Linux), and dialup services. What I'm having a
little trouble with is conceptually what to call our tree- or forest, or
whatever. Let's take the example of XYZ Cooling. We already have our web
site, xyzcooling.com, and it exists somewhere out on the internet hosted by
someone or other. Our mail services are handled by that same company. We
do have a static IP here at our site which is attached to our DSL and
internet gateway, however I've never really wanted to take on the burden of
dishing up email and web services. Also, I don't like the idea of
publishing our static ip for fear of some new sort of pingflood or whatever
they've come up with now.

When I go to name the AD server, say I'll call it XYZcooling, as the domain
name. Then, it seems to want a suffix - TLD? We tried .com, but then this
seems to create some confusion. If a user on my side of the firewall tries
to resolve xyxcooling.com, it determines that it's already defined in-house,
and won't go to our external web page. The consultant I am using thought it
would be appropriate to just change the TLD to '.prv', and that would solve
the problem.

Is this a proper way to solve this issue? I'm given to understand that
somehow or other, through routing tables or something, in the end it would
look something like this:

xyzcooling.com - resolves to the web server on the network. 132.222.222.121
or whatever..
xyz0000.xyzcooling.com - would be the AD controller.. (10.0.3.10 our
internal network)
xyzNT01.xyzcooling.com - would be the old NT PDC (10.0.3.1 our internal
network)
xyzRH02.xyzcooling.com - would be the beginning of my Linux Redhat boxes...
Internet gateway (10.0.3.5)
 
Just call it something like XYZcooling.XYZ or anything you like as long as
the extension does not match any of the internet DN extensions. You have
already discovered why one does not want to use XYZcooling.com as the
internal DN. In this way all you have to do is add a forwarder in DNS to
you ISPs DNS server to resolve any conflicks. Most of the time one does not
need a forwarder to access the internet as long as Root Hints has been set
up in DNS.

John
 
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