Naming a Domain

[Barnacle]

I am setting up my first Win2K Server and it is going to be a domain controller for a small company with 5 users.

They have a registered domain name that is very long. I would like the company to register a similar but shorter name. The new name is available.

If I put the new name in when setting up the domain controller (prior to registering) is that going to mess up anything? I want to name the domain the same as the registered name. Would it be wierd or cause any problems to have the names be the same, so the active directory name would be THISCOMPANY.THISCOMPANY.COM?

Also, what do you think about just naming the server SERVER? This is a very small company that will never have more than one server.

 

[peopleperson88]

In my experience it is best to name the Domain MyCompany.local and here is wht.

I have a company that had the name CompanyProducts. Their internet website was CompanyProducts.com and was hosted offsite (200.200.200.200). The local server was (192.168.0.1). When users would open up their Internet Explorer and type

http://www.CompanyProducts.com

it would error with an "Error 404, File not found" I determined that when the DNS was quering for CompanyProducts.com it would find it on the local server (192.168.0.1) and not on the internet (200.200.200.200). When you ping CompanyProducts.com you would receive 192.168.0.1. This caused a few problems because they were maintaining their own website but could get to it. To resolve it you could do three things. Start over, add the CompanyProducts.com to the host file of the user who will be maintaining the WebSite, or add the record to DNS manually.

What ever the case it doesn't work like it should, and that is why I would recommend adding .local to the domain name.

Naming the server "Server" doesn't matter too much. WIth 4 users it would be easy to remember. But you should get in the habit of naming it so it describes its purpose. If you ever get in a large environment. Server1, Server2 and Server3 serves no purpose.