consequences of change a computer name

[goldwhispers]

what happens when you change a computer name, can any information be lost and wot not?

 

[Shift838]

This all depends on what you have loaded on the server. Such as IIS, SQL, Exchange, etc. Various configuration are used in reference to the computer name installed. Such as if you change a computer name that already has SQL installed on it, you will have to reinstall SQL.

Exchange is not so bad, IIS it can be done, but your Applicaiton and Anonymous accounts for iis will remain the same old computer name.

When you change the computername, of course it will keep all shares, but your users if mapping to the old computer name, will have to update their share connections. Data should remain.

My suggestions is to research this area with each peice of software you have installed on the machine to make sure by changing the computer name you will not disable the software.

 

[vbrocks]

You can set up the computer to have more than one name (aliases) in the hosts file. You can keep the old name as an alias and not lose anything.

 

[rmb1905]

If avoidable using hostfiles, try so. It can be a real pain to update those hostfiles.

There is a way thinkable you can make sure the right hostsfile is used, by adding some kind of versioning to the hostsfile, check using your login script what version is on the pc and what version is current. If they are different, overwrite the version on the pc and replace it with the current version.

I used to work in a network environment that depended heavily on the hostsfile and created a similar construction. It works, but to be honest i wouldn't recomend it.