After recently experiencing a power outage that caused a slew of technical issues (even though we are on a battery backup system and gently powered down all servers, I'll add) I am looking to finally provide a long term solution to our less than ideal domain configuration. After putting together a checklist for processing the domain rename task and consolidating into 1 domain from 2, I came across the following article which throws a little bit of a wrench into things;
http://www.mdmarra.com/2012/11/why-you-shouldnt-use-local-in-your.html
So I understand the gist of why it's a bad thing to use a TLD such as .local, but I'd like to hear from some of you folks that are smarter than myself on how to best handle a domain rename with this in mind.
Presently, we have two domains and both are .local TLDs. One is oldbusinessname.local and the other is currentbusinessname.local with our website being currentbusinessname.org.
My plan right now entails taking currentbusinessname.local down as its own domain since it serves the least amount AD assets, etc... and then renaming oldbusinessname.local to currentbusinessname.local. I see now how that looks a little confusing but we want to operate with only one domain and we would like it to reflect the current and actual name of our business while we're at it.
So referencing that article, it seems as though I should instead create a new forest and root domain of currentbusinessname.org to match our website. Is this something that can be done via the domain rename operation or do I have to create it brand new and then manually recreate all of the AD assets within the new domain?