different domains

[Alex Lavrov]

Hello,

In our organization, years after years, came to life different domains and now it's very difficult to get rid of them because of legacy application. Now we have many servers with different domains, so sometimes it's a bit annoying trying to find out what is the domain of the server just to telnet it.

Ofcourse the big and hard working servers have the same domain (the new), but the old servers have so many domains ...

I wanted to ask, if someone have the same situation in his company and what solutions the found.

Thanx in advance!

[Steven E. Protter]

We have sucessfully migrated internally from one domain to another domain. We used to use our external domain(juf.org) for internal servers. For reasons that never fully satisfied me we decided to become juf.net on the inside.

We also have a number of domains in house on the Winblows side. I don't think its a good idea to publish that structure, but the extra domains were to have test groups on the same network.

We're probably restructuring again because we have a class B network internally and thats a HUGE collision domain.

One of the problems with multiple domains is getting mail around the organization. This can be solved with an internal HP-UX mail server that services the various domains. That would be similar to a webhosting business(I own one) that handles the mail for multiple domains.

To get from our old very chaotic situtation to our current less chaotic situation involved the following steps:

1) We mapped out the current structure and identified every box that needed to change.
2) The person(s) responsible for the boxes that needed to change were told to present plans on how to do the transition. In my case that involved a few itrc searches and a software call.
3) All the plans were put together and test plans were drawn up to make sure important functionality survived the transition.
4) The test and implementation plans were completed over a few weekends. The plans had stopping points that provided functionality.

Did things go perfect? No. One morning I walked in and my HP-UX servers could not talk to any printers via openspool. I had to set up a small DNS server to maintain the current infrastructure. That DNS server survives to this day to provide compatability.

That issue was caused by someone deviating from the project plan and eliminating one of the old domains needed for compatability.

I don't know if this helps. If you identify specific issues, I can provide more specific advice.

SEP