XADM: Exchange 2000 Server Name Requirements

Microsoft Windows 2000 servers are known by their fully qualified DNS name. For example, the following computers could exist in the same forest, especially if they are not on the same subnet: However, you cannot add the second one of these computers to the same Exchange 2000 organization because a server with the name "exchange-server" already exists.

In particular, the first 15 characters of the "host" or legacy NetBIOS portion of each server must be unique. This is often referred to as the short name of the computer. In other words, after you have a computer named "exchange-server", you need new names for your other servers.

If you want all servers to be known by the same name, you can create CNAME entries in DNS.

Additional name requirements and considerations for Exchange 2000

• Because Exchange 2000 occasionally attempts to contact servers by their short name instead of Fully-Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), you need to make sure that your DNS search order contains all applicable domains, especially when other name resolution methods (WINS, broadcast) are not available. For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
  284244� XADM: Exchange 2000 SETUP fails with error 0xC0070035
  For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
  259427� XADM: SETUP /FORESTPREP Does Not Work When Windows 2000 Sites Are Incorrectly Defined
• You should not name your server the same thing as what you expect to receive your email as. For example, if you wish for your users to have addresses of the form user@exchange.microsoft.com, you should not name any of your servers exchange.microsoft.com. The way you would insure that foreign systems can find this server is add a CNAME or MX record for exchange.microsoft.com and point that to the real name of the server.
  258967� XADM: Setup Fails on a Member Server Because of DNS Settings

There are some portions of Exchange 2000, especially in Mixed mode and during the Forestprep utility, that still use the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 methods to obtain and resolve computer names. Windows 2000 changes the primary way in which names are resolved to DNS.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Future versions of Exchange in Native mode will be based solely on DNS, because they will not need to interact with legacy systems. Until that time, it is important to consider these limitations.