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Crimsonfox
Asked: 2014-04-08 09:26:10 +0800 CST

Best Practice/Workflow for bulk renaming domain PC's

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So I've had to deal with renaming whole rooms of PC's before due to them being swapped out and incorrectly named or generally being moved around but I've never settled on a decent workflow.

I'll give an example of the most recent situation. (Win 7 PC's and a Win 2012 server) Approx. 30 PC's numbered from 1 to potentially anything, mostly within that 1-30 range though.

As it was a complete mess all the computer objects were removed from AD to start fresh.

In many cases I can simply change the name of the PC, restart and it will fine. If that doesn't work going through the Join a Domain or Workgroup wizard works and then finally if they don't work, changing to a workgroup, restart, re-join the domain and restart does it. Occasionally get trust relationship errors and have to re-do the last one.

As you can tell, it's messy, inefficient and potentially wrong in a few ways. I know I'm at risk of sounding vague and there's unlikely to be one single answer but it's time consuming and I'm very interested in improving my methodology and hopefully it will help some people.

windows-7

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I have been in a similarl situation before; The way I did is was using netdom, less clicks, and you can use a batch file or psexec to make life a lot easier/quicker.

    e.g.

    netdom renamecomputer member /newname:member1.exampledomain.com /userd:administrator

netdom add /d:exampledomain member1 /ud:exampledomain\admin /pd:password

shutdown /r
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  2. Based on your reply to metacom ("I should have also pointed out, unfortunately, the computers ideally need to be ordered so I've got to be in the room to find out which ones need changing to which names"), it sounds like you need an information gathering phase first.

    • Create a startup script in the language of your choice that writes the computer name to a network share. (echo %computername% >> \\server\share\room.txt or whatever)
    • Assign it to the OU in question.
    • Reboot the computers one by one in the sequence you want so the names are appended in order.

    There's also sneakernet and a thumb drive or that network share, if, for whatever reason, you don't have the computers in their own little OU.

    After you have those lists of computers, you could either use metacom's netdom script or something like this to rename the computers.

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