Help!!!

[Winterblues]

Hi all,
I was wondering if someone can help me with this issue.

We have a W2k domain which has the same name as our Internet website name. We would like to change this scenario and rename our internal domain to say .net. The problem I have is that we also have Exchange 2000 running on one of our DC's.

My questions are:
1. What issues are possible to arise if we retain Exchange 2000 and rename our internal domain? Has anyone had any experience doing this?
2. We are toying with the idea of moving to Exchange 2003 to use the anti-spam features. From what I have read at the MS KB articles, it is not advisable to put Exchange 2003 on a DC (or one has to manually stop the Exchange services before restarting the server). Would it be better to upgrade our existing Exchange 2000 server to Exchange 2003 and then work on the possibility of renaming the domain?
3. If we were to upgrade all our servers to Windows 2003, then can we rename the domain with losing data?

Any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

 

[Davetoo]

Just curious, but why are you wanting to change the name of your internal network for?

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

 

[Winterblues]

The problem is that we have the same AD name inside as our external web presence. The web server hosting our website is inside my AD domain. We are hosting our DNS’s ourselves. We have an internal DNS server (w2k) which is inside the domain. We are a web hosting company and have our own external DNS servers as well. Our internal DNS server has the public IP’s of websites. These websites are hosted on our internal servers. Our current firewall is the MS ISA server. We are in the process of removing the ISA server and replacing it with a PIX 506. However when I tried to replace the ISA server with the 506, I had to go into the internal DNS server database and change the IP’s of all my websites which have a public presence, to my internal IP addresses. Only then was I able to hit those websites from my inside network.

My boss feels that the reason for this is due to the fact that our internal domain name is the same as the external website name. Therefore the need for the change.

 

[wd5dbc]

The problem is that the PIX was misconfigured. If the PIX has been configured the same as ISA, you would not have needed to change all of the DNS entries.

MS recommended that the local AD domain be named domain.local so that there would be no cofusion, but you should be fine with the public domain name.

hc