Renaming domain with Exchange 2013 installed in AD

Question

Hello, 
We installed Exchange 2013 into a Windows 2003 Domain (Forest and Domain are Native 2003).  The internal FQDN is for example internal.local  and the external FQDN is external.com. 
We created a certificate request in exchange that included both the internal and external FQDN’s for a 5 domain UCC certificate from godaddy.com.  When requesting the cert all
of the .local addresses were removed (was 10 domain names but who wants to pay more).  When we install the certificate on the exchange server and assign services to the certificate, OWA works externally without issue but internally OWA and outlook do
not work (certificate errors).
Is the following our only course of action or do we have another option?
Un-install Exchange (we’ll backup the user mailboxes via pst file as there are less than 10 mailboxes)
Rename the domain
Install Exchange 2013 again
Re-build the mailboxes

Answer 1

As others mentioned, it would not be a good idea here to rename your domain. It would be better to review the DNS names used internally to make sure that they are in the scope of the used certificate. You might consider using a split-DNS setup for internal
users if the certificate you use contains only external DNS domains.
For renaming an AD domain, you can refer to that: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738208(v=ws.10).aspx
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