Question about Active Directory Domain

sizeon

Is it necessary to register a domain or can i have something like company.com and not have to buy the domain? Also, in what situation would you use a .local domain?

TheNewITGuy

No, you dont have to register the domain. .local is just your standard local domain prefix it is not a requirement

EasyMac308

If you're just playing, I generally use a .local domain. If you're a business, you're going to want a real internet domain. They're not super expensive and staking out your territory can prevent issues later.

rowelld

It's not necessary but I would register it. If your company name is TechExams and you have a website, techexams.net, I would create an AD domain called techexams.com. And also register that domain too.

Just my 2cents.

rsutton

It's best practice to use .local (or similiar) for your internal domain, and register a .com (or similair) for your external domain.

rowelld

It's been best practice for a long time now. I've began seeing some downsides to using .local. One of them is using Lync. In my experience I had issues using .local to get it all working. But that might be because of my lack of knowledge installing Lync

rsutton

If you are using Lync on Office365 I am all too familiar with what you might be running in to. It should work fine on-premise however.

Shdwmage

From my new studies the common thing to do is corp.domain.com

One of the biggest reasons for this is the change to the intranet registrar. I imagine .local will eventually become an active end to a domain.

Correction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

they reserved .local, however there is some pertinent information in that article.

sizeon

Why would you want to register a domain if you are not going to use it as a website?

blargoe

If you are going to use a real TLD domain name, it should be one you own. If someone else registers that name on the public internet, it can create some issues for you if you are using that same domain name because you are only going to authorative for that name within the confines of your internal network. Which might become a problem if your roaming users ever go outside of your network and are using a DNS server that will direct your roaming devices's queries for your domain to someone else's DNS server.

ptilsen

KB 300684 mentions this:

We recommend that you register DNS names for the top-most internal and external DNS namespaces with an Internet registrar.

Bear in mind, however, that this article is written for various communications server products, not Active Directory or Windows. I have not seen any official best practice that suggests a catch-all recommendation for split-brain DNS configuration with regards to AD. Certainly, what Blargoe said is 100% correct. If you are using a domain name that could be valid on the Internet, you absolutely want to purchase it, even if it goes unused. The rest is going to depend on the situation. I would argue that for many organizations, it is ideal not to use a DNS name that would be valid on the Internet. Whether .local or .int or .anything is used is not really that important on its own. For a single-forest, single-domain system (e.g. a typical SBS scenario of yore), using .local or something of that nature is arguably preferable.