I have an Active Directory domain (we'll call OLD.TLD
) in production and need to change the name (for reasons I won't elaborate on).
There are many, many files with links to a DFS namespace in this domain. They mostly use the NetBIOS Name, so a referral would be something like \\OLD\DFS\FOLDER
which refers to \\SERVER\FOLDER
.
At the end of the process, everything will be in the new domain (NEW.TLD
) and the server will be SERVER.NEW.TLD
. But it's necessary for \\OLD\DFS
to work even after the old domain is gone.
I've considered the one-shot domain rename, changing just the FQDN but leaving the NetBIOS name intact. But this will cause a lot of havoc for people working from home. (plus it will keep NetBIOS as a requirement).
So instead, I thought about migrating to a new domain with ADMT.
In order to investigate this, I:
- created a test domain
TEST.TLD
in a new forest - created a two-way forest trust between
OLD.TLD
andTEST.TLD
- created a DNS stub zone in
OLD.TLD
to point toTEST.TLD
- created DNS CNAME records in
TEST.TLD
to referSERVER
toSERVER.OLD.TLD
andOLD
toOLD.TLD
. Also there are CNAMEs to point the old domain controllers to the old domain.
So now, accounts in TEST.TLD
can access \\OLD\DFS
without any problems. Next I tried to see if I could fool the test domain into thinking that \\OLD\DFS
was in the new domain. This is a process I envision happening as the final step of migration before removing the trust, and taking the old domain controllers down.
- Created a domain DFS namespace for
TEMP.TLD
and added a couple of folder referrals to it, so that I can tell the two apart. - Disabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP in
TEMP.TLD
- Changed the CNAME record for
OLD
to point toTEST.TLD
. - cleared all three DFS caches, as well as DNS server and local caches.
However when I try to access \\OLD\DFS
, I get all of the \\OLD.TLD\DFS
folders. Is there another setting I need to change? Is it even possible to 'alias' a domain DFS namespace this way?