I have a group of computers on a domain that I want to be able to remote control via RDP. All computers are WinXP. I changed the "ComputerName"s through the SYSTEM CONTROL PANEL of the computers; to administer them easier- example cea-laneXXX etc….
I can connect to them thru the domain with rdp. Problem is that some of the computers want me to login under my own account, making me log off the current remote user. This didnt happen on all the computers. I downloaded a network scanner and scanned the range. And I found out that some of the computers HOSTNAME and COMPUTERNAME were the same, and some computers the HOSTNAME didnt change. After some testing, the computers where the HOSTNAME and the COMPUTERNAME didnt match I had to log in under my domain account, and the matching computers would allow remote access without the logging on/off of current user.
Here is the image of the network scan showing the results:
so what is going on? Is this DNS problem? We use Win2003 Server for DNS. But I thought when you change the computer name it is suppose to change the hostname automatically. Some of them did change, but not all. All computers were rebooted.
Best Answer
A computer can have multiple "names" on the network. There is a name that the computer has itself. There is a name in the local DNS system populated through discovery or auto-update or DHCP propagation. There might be specifically assigned "A" records in the DNS connected to the IP address. And there is the name of the computer account in the Windows Active Directory.
Assuming a standard Windows domain, what you should have done is change the computer to be in a workgroup, which deletes the domain account for the computer under the old name, then add the computer to the domain with the new name. Just changing the name results in the kind of inconsistent behavior that you describe, because the names don't properly synchronize.
One workaround ... remove the computers from the domain, manually delete any stray old accounts from Active Directory, manually delete any stray old computer names from DNS, then put the computers back into AD.