In part two of this three part series, author James Rudley takes us through the actual renaming process. Part one covered the setup of the tools and part three will cover the Exchange Server 2003 portion.

Rendom will translate this file into a sequence of directory update instructions that will be executed individually and remotely on each DC in the forest. Run the following command from the control center PC to upload the changes to the DCs.

rendom /upload

Now, you should have a dclist.xml in your rendom folder. It should have every domain controller in your forest. Now, force replication and check for the resource records that are required for DC location and for Active Directory replication. Next use the DNS monitoring tool to check that the correct SRV resource records that are used by DC Locator have been registered in DNS. Now we will verify the readiness of domain controllers by running the following command from the command line

rendom /prepare

Do not be alarmed if you get a domain controller or 2 that did not prepare successfully. This will be common in a large forest. Just rerun the command again and it will prepare the rest. Dclist.xml should look like this showing each domain controller has been prepared.

Now, it is time to execute the instructions on each domain controller. This will cause all domain controllers to reboot. Run the following from the command line on your control center PC.

rendom /execute

Once your domain controllers are back up, let's work on exchange to make it work with the renamed domain.