How can I rename the main domain in GMS?

Question

How can I rename the domain name that I setup when I installed GMS?

Answer

Please Note: In this example the domain names used are old-domain.com and new-domain.com.

Option 1 – Adding Aliases
The way this is done is to add the domain aliases of "new-domain.com" and "*.new-domain.com" in the Domain > Aliases section of the GMS administration interface. This allows the existing domain to also accept mail for this new domain. Then your users just need to change the Reply-To address in their clients to "user@new-domain.com".

Option 2 – New domain¹
This method involves adding a full domain called new-domain.com, moving your users across to it then deleting old-domain.com. You will need to do the following:

• First of all please take a backup copy of the setup.txt and GMS directory structure before you attempt this (with these we can restore the original system).
• Ensure there is a free IP address on your Network card for the new domain.
• Go to Domains > Add Domain in the GMS interface and add a domain called new-domain.com and assign the free IP address to it.
• Next from a command line change directories to Gordanobin (ntmailbin on older versions)
• Type "mail -domain old-domain.com -listusers old-domain.txt". This dumps a list of users for old-domain.com into a file called old-domain.txt
• Still at the command line type "mail -domain new-domain.com -append old-domain.txt". This adds all the users listed in the old-domain.txt file to the new domain.
• Stop all the GMS services.
• Copy the contents of the Gordanoold-domain.com directory over the Gordanonew-domain.com directory. This ensures the user’s mailboxes are moved over.
• Please ensure that the new-domain.com has an administrative account, you may need to create a admin profile then apply this profile to the postmaster account.
• Restart the GMS Services and log on to the Administration interface. Go to the Domains>Delete Domain page and delete old-domain.com
• If you then want the new domain to have the IP address that was assigned to the old domain you can change this from the Domains>Edit Domain page of the interface.
• Please ensure that if you are using any user authentication that the user database is updated with the new domain name.
• If you have any problems you will need to use your backup files to return to your original configuration then use Option 1 above.

¹Some users may lose some of their personal preferences as a result of using this method. A dry run is recommended on a test server.

Keywords:rename, domain, setup, move