Hi all;

Recently we have been changing names of all of our Domain joined workstations.    The procedure we are using is we rename the computer while at the same time moving it to a workgroup.  Then following a reboot we log in as local admin and join it back to the domain.   All new names have been created before hand in their respective AD OUs.   For the most part everything is going great.   However within SCCM Configuration Manager console there seems to a problem with some of the computers making the connection to SCCM.  On several of the computers I've visited I've found that the last user to login was the local admin account that joined the computer to the domain.

Is it possible that the connection to SCCM isn't completed until a Domain User logs onto the computer?

All and any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

WD

The last user is reported via heartbeat, so you have to make sure that it ran again after the client was joined to the new domain. 

You are using ConfigMgr, but are moving computers to the new domain manually? Why not using ConfigMgr for that?

Why are you unjoining the computers from the domain at all?

The ConfigMgr client to site connection has nothing to do with any logged in users; it's a service. It will send the current info via heartbeat and thus the site will reflect the last logged in user at the time the heartbeat was sent. By default, heartbeat discovery only runs once every 7 days. I always reduce this to once every day. During this renaming period in your environment, you could set it even lower (like every 2-4 hours) if you want the info updated more frequently.

Hi Folks;

Thanks for the responses.  Truly do appreciate it.

A few points for clarification.  We are not moving to a new domain.  Just renaming computers so that the computer name will give us some information like location of the computer and it's purpose.  IE is it a student computer or a student computer.

Didn't know we could use Config Manager to do the rename and certainly don't know how to accomplish that.

Over the years whenever we are replacing computers or renaming computers, we've found it best to take the computer off the domain give it the new name and then join it back to the domain.  In the case of replacing computers we simply remove the old computer from the network, reset the computer account in AD and then give the new computer the same name and join it to the domain.

So for the rename project I simply sat down at the computer and gave it the new name and set it to workgroup and rebooted. Then log in as local admin and join it the domain.  Most of our computers got reimaged using Ghost and after the reimage the computers simply got the new name and were joined to the domain.

I should mention that while we have had SCCM for several years now I have not had much training on it and so it's a constant learning curve.

Thanks again for all your help.

WD

"we've found it best to take the computer off the domain give it the new name and then join it back to the domain."

I've never ever had that experience; simply renaming it has always worked fine for me and is also how it was designed to work.

"got reimaged using Ghost "

That's a bit scary. I'm hoping the image was at least properly syspreped.

This isn't a ConfigMgr specific task. In general ConfigMgr simply runs what you tell it to. You simply need to know what to tell it which is in no way specific to ConfigMgr in this case.

netdom.exe will rename a computer using a simple command-line: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/298593. This should work fine using the local System account which is what ConfigMgr will use.

Thanks again for all the responses.   This last post was especially helpful.

First off Ghost has always worked extremely well for us.   And yes the images are properly sysprepped with answer files that take care of most of our after-imaging configuration tasks. 

I started researching the netdom stuff and came across something even better.  A powershell cmdlet that does the trick.   I've rewritten a snippet of code that I found and now have a cool little script for doing this.   I have a dozen or so computers at one location that still need to be renamed as well as about 40 at another.  My script will make it very easy for me.

The script use a .csv file that contains the old-names and new-names.  The script finds the old-name in AD and on the network then renames both.  Only tested on single systems so far but will be expanding the test this week.

Thanks again everyone

WD