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Possible Duplicate:
Choosing local versus public domain name for Active Directory

I'm using company.com.qa as my email domain, which I have hosted with my ISP. Can I use same domain name, company.com.qa, for my Windows 2008 Domain Controller? Should I use company.local or something else?

Community
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Prasanna
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2 Answers2

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I would suggest local.company.com.qa if you're company.com.qa. Using company.local will cause you problems if you have Mac clients on your network.

Bill Weiss
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  • Could you expand on this, please? – Dan May 16 '12 at 15:00
  • Sure. Macs use `.local` as an indicator that a name should be resolved via Bonjour, so they'll try that first. In our case that means a 30 second wait to look up any `something.something.local` address that our AD serves up (we went with `companyname.local` before realizing this). As well, if you want a Mac server, it will refuse to use a `.local` name for itself. `corp.company.com.qa` or whatever is good as well. – Bill Weiss May 16 '12 at 15:04
  • Some people use domainname.corp for theirs. Really though, not much of a problem if you use your real domain name either if you can manage a separate dns for internal vs public. The only problem with this is the lack of http://domainname.com for internal people. – Bad Dos May 16 '12 at 15:36
  • My honest opinion is that you should use a subdomain of your real domain: DNS will be sane (remember, you don't have to make that DNS public just because it's in a real domain!) and it just makes sense. That's a subjective measure, obviously :) – Bill Weiss May 16 '12 at 16:56
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Conventional wisdom on this matter is to use a subdomain of an Internet-registered DNS name you already own. So in your case, something like corp.company.com.qa or ad.company.com.qa.

ThatGraemeGuy
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