Domain Rename

[Andy Haigh_1]

I have just visited a new customer who has a bit of a mess left behind. It
seems a domain rename was done, which seems to have been completed apart from removing the old DNS zone from the server. This looks like it is causing them a number of problems with name resolution even though everything should be using the new zone. Is there anything I should check before removing the old zone?

The config is a DC and member server running exchange at one site with the
same setup at another site, this is setup as one domain using AD sites across a 512Kb VPN.

The layout of the DNS Forward Lookup Zones is:

_msdcs.olddomain.local
olddomain.local
newdomain.local

Surely the _msdcs entry should be for the new domain?

Don't want to make things worse but was going to remove the olddomain.local and _msdcs.olddomain.local domains from the DNS server. Can anyone see any problems?

Currently the exchange servers will log errors saying it can't find a GC and lists the DNS address of the old domain. I have done a DCdiag on each server and everything looks fine.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

Andy

[Igor Karasik]

Andy,
See "Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing Domain Rename"
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/downloads/domainrename.mspx
"As a result of the domain DNS name changes that occurred during the domain rename operation, some of the DNS zones in your DNS infrastructure might no longer be needed. For example, if there was a DNS zone with a name that matched the old DNS name of a renamed domain, there might be no more DNS records (SRV, A, and PTR resource records) with the old domain suffix that need to be registered with DNS. In this case, such DNS zones that are no longer needed can be removed."
Read whole document, I think your problems
with "can't find a GC" not related to old DNS things.
Note also you need to run XDR-fixup.

read also this
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Domain-Rename.html

Rgards, Igor