Our customer is requesting that we change the name of their new SBS 2011 server. Obviously this is not possible, or at least not recommended. I've told them that it would not be worth the effort to change the name, but I'm wondering if there is another possible solution. Their main concern is with accessing file shares (and mapped drives).
My thought was to create a second DNS name and update the mapped drives to use that name. Any other suggestions?
I'm not sure about SBS, but there are security settings in 2003 and 2008 standard that stop access attempts that aren't directed to the actual host name, something about duplicate names on the network. There was a way around this via group policy when I had to do this for 2003.
If you have your systems in a domain environment why not use group policy preferences and automatically map out your shares?
Just create a CNAME in DNS Server: it's how "companyweb" is setup to be a more convenient/descriptive DNS name for SharePoint than "somesbsserver".
Make sure that, if you're changing the drive mappings, use the fully-qualified domain name not the NetBIOS name (i.e. mynewconvenientname.mydomain.local).
I disable NetBIOS on my networks, but you should be able to edit the registry an add a NetBIOS alias if you really need it like so (haven't tried it yet though; use at your own risk, etc.):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parametersand add anOptionalNamesstring value.