I had the difficult task to reorganise a medium network in a factory. Inbetween all the operations i had to do i also had to rename all the computers in the network and organise them by departments. Now this wouldn’t be such a headache unless all the computers are in a linux domain. As you probably know when joining a domain, every computer gets a “computer account”. If you want to rename the computer you have to disconect the computer from the domain, reboot it, rename the computer, reboot it again, re-join the domain and reboot again to be able to login and have the new computer running in the domain again. This really sucks when you have to deal with 50 computers or more. Here’s the solution i found to do this.

REMEMBER! THIS WORKS WITH A LINUX SAMBA DOMAIN running with a TDBSAM Backend, If you have a WINDOWS DOMAIN or a LINUX DOMAIN with LDAP BACKEND this WON’T WORK !!!! Also this howto was only tested with WINDOWS XP. I don’t know if it’ll work in vista but i think it should.

First of all you have to login to the computer with a local administrative account ( eg. Administrator ).

Go to -> Start -> run > and type regedit.

Go to this key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName]

Under Computer Name you’ll have 2 subfolders: ActiveComputerName and ComputerName, and in the 2 subfolders you’ll see the key ComputerName with the value being your current computer name. Change both of these values to the new name you want for your machine.

Reboot. ( this is the only time you need to reboot ).

Go to your linux domain controler and search for the smbpasswd file. This file stores both the computer and user accounts. Find your old computer’s name in this file. It should look something like this :

GKOO$:1396:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX:578E3D23GF5C1AA7588D3295281282EB:[W          ]:LCT-00000000:

Change it’s name to the new name you assigned previously to your windows machine. Be sure to keep the $ mark at the and of the name ( the $ sign means this account is a machine account not a user account ) and also all the other numbers following your computer name.

Next create a machine account on your linux box with the new computer name:

useradd -s /bin/false -d /dev/null gkoonew$ ( remember to always attach the $ sign to your machine account name ).

That’s it you should now be able to login to your domain with the new computer name. If you can’t watch the samba logs, they’ll tell you a lot. Also you can remove the old machine account from your linux users database to keep things more organised.

Good luck, GKoo.