Renaming a single-label domain to a FQDN

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:56:54 +0000

Long ago – eons, perhaps – before I had anything to do with the Windows environment here, someone created the AD domain in my company as a single-label domain (e.g. instead of “example.com” our domain is just “example”). Over the years this has led to lots of “fun” on the part of Windows admins who’ve worked here as the implications of this choice became more apparent.

Since I inherited this system about a year ago, I haven’t really bumped up against any problems stemming from the single-label domain issue… until now. I recently attempted to add a new Windows 2008r2 file server to our DFS replication group/namespace. This totally failed for some mysterious reason. Well, I shouldn’t say “totally” failed, as I was able to add it to the DFS replication group, but unable to add it to the DFS namespace. In my attempt to debug the namespace issue, I deleted the namespace and attempted to recreate it, but just kept getting this error: The namespace cannot be queried. The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.. I couldn’t do anything with the namespace - even clicking on it in the DFS Management console brought up an error. After some searching I found that this was likely due to having a single-label domain. I wasn’t sure why the error was happening even on Windows 2003 machines though, maybe joining a 2008r2 box to the domain made some schema changes? I tried a few suggestions like editing the hosts file but nothing seemed to resolve this.

Rename on Evan Hoffman

Renaming a single-label domain to a FQDN