Two names for one PC?

Hi all,

I inherited a rather nighmarish AD network. Am cleaning it and ran into something interesting I've never seen before.

There is a PC listed in AD named "taxcoll2 ". Had a suspicion it was deprecated and gone, so i tried to RDP to it. Surprisingly, it came up. I logged in and in roaming around checked the computer name. It was "lharrower ", not "taxcoll2 ".

HUH? How is this possible and how can I fix it?

Also, I know this has been asked a thousand times, and I have Googled left and right. Is there an easy way to go through AD and see the last login dates of computers? That would help me greatly in cleaning up this mess.

Thanks!

 

Get the IP of the machine and then look in DNS! More than likely there will be the 2 (or more) host names assigned to that same IP address.

Delete the 'rogue' old name!

 

Hi again,

Apologies for the long time since posting... OK, I went to the forward lookup zone of DNS and do see that both PCs have the same IP address in the "data" column. I deleted "taxcoll2" since as far as I know, that PC does not exist. But I have noticed far more...

By sorting by the Data column, I am seeing that there are a TON of duplicates...

So I'm thinking this isn't particularly good. There are at least 50+ duplicate entries in here. And I don't know of a way to determine which machines are the rightly named on and which aren't. I also have to wonder how this happened and what kinf of problems it is all causing.

I am by no means a DNS guru. What would happen if I just deleted all this? Would it repopulate correctly over time? Would that be a giant no-no? What should I do about all this?

THANKS!

 

Yeah...definitely do NOT go deleting DNS entries just because they are duplicates, that's not best practice at all!

Sent you a PM.