I've got a client whose US company has a European partner of the same name. Their AD Forests have the exact same xxxx.local name, but are completely different forests. They were interested in renaming the domain to something else so that when they travel to the European office, their laptops don't freak out and stop trusting both domains (which locks them out). This would also open the door for the option of creating a tunnel and trust between the companies. Does anyone have experience renaming a domain? (and yes I know the recommended procedure is "don't")
Indeed new would be ideal, but many organizations will opt for the "one time battle w/ casualties" rather than dragging it out over time, simply because of the risks associated with personnel turnover, and losing sight of the original intel..
Yeah I thought as much. This US company has 1 office and less than 15 people. Two employees live out of country and two live on different ends of the country. It shouldn't be too much trouble to have the road warriors send their machines in to the home office for the transition. I guess I'm still weighing the two options... Rename or start fresh. Lots of planning and prep either way. Years ago it started out as SBS 2003, which was upgraded to SBS 2008 at some point. This is the point where I started working on it. Removed Exchange (which was running but never used and completely killed the performance of the server), disabled RRAS (in favor of pfSense's IPSec), and replaced their server with 2012 R2 Std w/ 2 VM DCs on new hardware. Ever since then it has run great. I suppose it would be nice to remove all that SBS junk that's still in AD...
We haven't renamed the domain yet. We contacted the IT guy for the European office to get more information and it turns out they have Server 2012 R2 Essentials installed (like srsly, wtf?). So the plan right now is to rename the US domain to a different TLD of the European one (.us to their .com) and transition everyone in the US to 365 and Sharepoint (and also moving their email off the European branch's Exchange server into Exchange Online). We'll figure out the best way to share files between the domains at a later time. Does anyone know if 2012 R2 Essentials supports domain trusts or if it has any limitations to them?
look for RENDOM, easy to use, and fast safe way to switch domain name. cmd -> rendom /list edit the xml saved on the same folder you have executed the command. then rendom /upload rendom /prepare rendom /execute (restart) rendom /end be happy, all machines will be on the new domain, the users just have to click on switch user, and login again with the same user, everything is there RENDOM comes with Windows server 2008 and newer