The netdom.exe utility is included in the Windows XP Support Tools (Support\Tools folder on the Windows XP CD-ROM). It can be used for e.g. renaming computers in a Windows-domain. I used it in a script some months ago, when our department decided that “more generic” computer names are better than using the primary users last name as computername (:S).
When you have to rename multiple computers via a batch script, it makes sense to have some list with the old and new names. I did this in Excel. The command line I used with netdom in order to rename a computer was:
netdom.exe renamecomputer <OldComputername> /newname:<NewComputername> /userd:<Domain-Admin> /passwordd:<Password of Domain-Admin> /usero:<Domain-Admin> /passwordo:<Password of Domain-Admin> /reboot:<Time before rebooting in seconds>
(For more detailed information about netdom and a description of the parameters I refer to this and this article.)
In the first step I created a column at the beginning of my excel sheet and filled it with “netdom.exe renamecomputer”. The second column consists of the old computername. In the third column I typed “/newname:”, the fourth column is filled with the new computername and so on. So you see that I “built” each line of my rename-script with Excel. At last you just have to save it as CSV, open it with a text editor, replace all separators with spaces and check the basis of the script for errors.
[...] be done with netdom.exe. It is part of the Windows XP support tools. I wrote about it in another post. For a description how to use it I suggest you read this article. Instead of simply changing the [...]
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