Changing Domain on SBS

I have a question regarding renaming the local domain controller and the local domain on my SBS 2003 Server. I have a funny feeling that I cant rename it and would need to do a full reinstall, but I will ask incase there any alternatives.

Example My company is called 'Rapid Mortgages' and setup for rapidmortgages.local and website on www.rapidmortgages.com.

My company wants to rebrand after a takeover to 'Speedy Mortgages' and change the local domain to speedymortgages.local and website on speedymortgages.com.

I know I can easily change the POP mail boxes to the new @speedymortgages.com address, but will i have issues with exchange as local and email domains different? Obviously my Remote Web Workplace address would need to change to speedymortgages.com/remote. Web site is hosted externally.

Any advice would be a big help.

 

I think you will hit problems if you change the .local address. If it were me, I'd leave the .local address as it is, and just change the .com address.

It is already handling this as rapidmortgages.local is a totally different domain from rapidmortgages.com.

The DNS name space hierarchy works from right to left. So there is not a "rapidmortgages" object with two sub-objects of com and local. Rather the root com object has a sub-object called "rapidmortgages ", and the root local object has a sub-object called "rapidmortgages ". So rapidmortgages.local and rapidmortgages.com are in completely different name spaces. rapidmortgages.com is no closer to rapidmortgages.local than speedymortgages.com.

Think of it like people's names - which also work from right to left. Bill Jones, and Bill Smith are unlikely to be related. Helen Smith and Bill Smith might well be related. The surname tells you what group you are in, and the first name identifies a member within the surname group.

Both rapidmortgages.com and speedymortgages.com are members of the com group (name space). rapidmortgages.local is a member of the local group (name space).

 

Thanks Reggie, helps me understand a bit more. But if i leave my network as rapidmortgages.local, can I configure emails (via exchange) and Remote Web Workplace to use the *speedymortgages.com address? I presume from what you said I can as they are unrelated. So do you think I can completely change my company's name to Speedy Mortgages and the users would not notice any difference except a change in email address? I can live with rapidmortgages.local even though company is now Speedy Mortages, as long as it doesnt cause too much disruption to users.

 

Its been a while since I played with Exchange, but I know you can assign multiple e-mail addresses to a single mailbox. I would recommend that you add the speedymortgages.com addresses to each mailbox. In the versions of Exchange I used to use, you had to add additional addresses manually. With more uptodate versions there may well be a way of updating the mailboxes en masse. Each mailbox will then have three addresses assigned (one for each of the domains: rapidmortgages.com, rapidmortgages.local and speedymortgages.com.). You then need to set the speedymortgages.com as the mailbox default (again, you used to have to do that indivdually, but there may well be a bulk way of changing the default to the address for a particular domain).

You also have to set Exchange to recognise the new domain as belonging to it. I think that is essential if you are using an SMTP feed into the server. However, if you are pulling e-mails from your ISP via a POP3 mail feed, I think you may get away with just assigning the addresses to the mailboxes.

If you do this, your users will get the new addresses, but also any mail sent to their old address will still be routed to the correct mailbox.

If you are using Outlook via IMAP, then that should be enough. If any clients are using POP3 rather than IMAP, you will have to change their default e-mail address at the client. That is in Outlook.