Domain Name with underscore

[eve Jimah]

I hope to migrate my windows nt4 domain to windows 2000 in a couple of Months. However I have an underscore in my domain name , which am told might be an issue when I migrate to win2k. No one has been able to give me a logical explanation for this reasoning. My domain name is abc_xyz.

Can anyone confirm if there is any issue with having underscore in an NT4 domain name, if so what are the issues and how do I resolve this before migration.

I have just one One Domain, with a PDC, a Backup and 12 member servers

thanks

[pip]

Hi, i want to kown if you make your migration with a domain name with underscore or you change the name. In the next quarter, i probably need to make this kind of migration and i want some background about it.

Thanks

[Drak]

Im running Win2K server with no problems w "abc_xyz"

Should be ok

[gunderstone]

Here are a few points to remember:

With regards to RFC standards, DNS names are restricted to the characters A to Z, digits, and the hyphen(-)

Microsoft's machine naming is based on Netbios names which supports a much wider character set including the underscore (_),

Microsoft's W2K DNS supports alternate character set defined in RFC 2181 that specifies that a DNS label can be any binary string that does not necessarily need to be interpreted as ASCII.

Here is a subsection of RFC 1034

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1034.txt?number=1034

The following syntax will result in fewer problems with many
applications that use domain names (e.g., mail, TELNET).

<domain> ::= <subdomain> | " "

<subdomain> ::= <label> | <subdomain> "." <label>

<label> ::= <letter> [ [ <ldh-str> ] <let-dig> ]

<ldh-str> ::= <let-dig-hyp> | <let-dig-hyp> <ldh-str>

<let-dig-hyp> ::= <let-dig> | "-"

<let-dig> ::= <letter> | <digit>

<letter> ::= any one of the 52 alphabetic characters A through Z in
upper case and a through z in lower case

<digit> ::= any one of the ten digits 0 through 9

Note that while upper and lower case letters are allowed in domain names, no significance is attached to the case. That is, two names with the same spelling but different case are to be treated as if identical.

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less.