Re -naming an NT 4 Domain

[KingofSketch]

Howdy Guys and gals,

Heres a puzzler for you to get the old grey matter working,

I am currently in the process of planning my companies Active Direcory upgrade (god knows what i did to deserve it, but i won't do it again)
The company wants to keep the same domain name after the upgrade and will not budge on this issue, thus making my life a nightmare for me becaure in order to user the migration tools the NT4 domain and the 2000 domain have to be called something different.

I have thought of a work around but i'm not sure how possible it is,

1. Is it possible to rename an NT4 domain?
2. If it is what is the best way to go about it?

or if you think its a plan doomed to failure, please do say so


Cheers

Sketch
"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines"

 

[CoolClark]

Best way to do an inplace migration:

Build a BDC. Take it offline and leave it offline.
Upgrade your PDC to windows 2000.
Verify everything is running properly. AD,DNS,WINS,etc.
Once everything is running error free (or at least close to error free ) upgrade your BDCs to 2000.
Once all of your NT4.0 BDCs are upgraded you can switch to Native mode.

If you have a catastrophic failure, you can take the BDC you took offline and promote it to PDC while you repair the win2k/pdc.

Post to the Win2K group if you have anymore questions. A lot of people have gone through the same type of upgrade.

 

[djhawthorn]

Firstly, Windows 2000 domain naming convention is different to the NT 4 domain naming convention, thus you can't keep the same one. Sorry management, but you are limited to what the OS lets you do.

Windows 2000 works on DNS naming conventions, but has support for older NT4 domain names. So your new domain name would be something like 'companyname.com', but will support your old 'DOMAIN' NT4 name (as NT4 workstations can't handle DNS domain names). Once you switch to native mode though, you will only have the 'companyname.com' domain name.

You can rename a NT4 domain, though I don't know why you'd do it. To go about it, you'd have to rename the PDCs domain name first, (reboot), then do all the BDCs, then all the workstations and member servers you do last. Finally you'd have to redo any domain trusts you have setup.

Last thing I'll mention, don't switch to native mode unless you have only W2K or XP boxes on the network. NT4 and Win9x boxes can't handle the newer features of Windows 2000 AD, and will not run in a W2K AD (Native) environment. MCSE NT4/W2K