AD DS New Forest Domain Naming Problem

Question

Hey everyone,
I'm having a bit of a conundrum about the new forest domain name and what possible implications it can have if I chose the wrong name convention...
Current Setup
The current issue is that the company I work for was bought out by another company and atm, where using a 2-way forest trust.
The company also has another site in Africa which is using a different forest domain but doesn't have any forest trust to either of the other 2 domains.
The current forest domains are:-
1. Company1.local (my old company)
2. Company2.com.au (main company)
3. internal.company2direct.com.ke (Africa site)
To make it worse, all three sites have their own Exchange environment and there's all types of file share/application authentication issues between sites.
Therefore, the company has decided that they want to get rid of all the exchange environments/file shares and so forth and move everything to
Office365, including SharePoint and Lync
New Solution
They have also decided that they want a new forest with a single domain and that the locations and security will be delegated by using different OU structures/GPO's as it's all going to administered by 2 people at the main company site. This is non-negotiable
as they don't want sub/child domains or different forests, just a single entity.
They're using a third party to do the Office365 design and implementation. However I have been assigned to setup the new initial ADDS server for the new forest.
After some reading I've found that we really shouldn't be using '.local' or '.internal' for the forest root domain. I suggested that we use 'internal.thecompanynamethatisreallylong.com.au' and a NetBIOS of 'CNF' (which is actually that long,
and I feel that if we have to use a FQDN for anything then it will cause an issue)
They want me use the following for the forest root domain ' au.cnf' with a NetBIOS of 'CNF'
Is that really such a good idea or is there any situation whereby using 'au.cnf' as the
prefix.suffix could cause any issues?
I would of like to use 'internal.cnf.com.au' however the domain name 'cnf.com.au' is already registered by another company..
Once the new forest is created, I'll create a 2way trust between the companies and start using ADMT to migrate accounts across
Thanks in advance for you help

Answer 1

Hello,
for AD limits, especially amount of usable characters, please see
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc756101.aspx
Personally I would NOT use the "CNF" as NetBIOS domain name. "CNF" in AD stands for "Conflicting object" and this will be shown in dcdiag or repadmin outputs when conflicts are listed as doubled names for example.
For the internal naming I would always use short domain names. Top level domain names to avoid for WAAD and Office365 I would also check with the experts in http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/azure/en-US/home?forum=WindowsAzureAD
and http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/default.aspx
You could use public TLDs but keep in mind that you have to configure split DNS that way.
Best regards
Meinolf Weber
MVP, MCP, MCTS
Microsoft MVP - Directory Services
My Blog: http://blogs.msmvps.com/MWeber
Disclaimer: This posting is provided AS IS with no warranties or guarantees and confers no rights.
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