Rename Sharepoint Central admin machine name in SharePoint 2010 farm

Question

This might be wrong place to ask this question. I spent effort in setting up thr sharepoint 2010 2 tier farm. I have settled up the sql server databases required for sharepoint, installed on different machine. and sharepoint on another machine. it took around 6 days, but at the end i noticed that i have computer name with something "win43453-676" like this. where as my manager wants to to keep relavant name like "CentralAdminMachine" of central admin pc. if i changed the name of machine , i am unable to open even central administration site. is there any remedy to change this name in configuration database and all....?

Answer 1

There is both a PowerShell cmdlet and an STSADM command that allow you to change the server name. Both require that you first change the name through the standard Windows System control panel. After that (and a restart) you can use:

Rename-SPServer [-Identity] <OriginalServerName> -Name <NewServerName>

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263117(office.12).aspx

or

Rename-SPServer [-Identity] <SPServerPipeBind> -Name <String> [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Confirm [<SwitchParameter>]] [-WhatIf [<SwitchParameter>]]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607556.aspx

There are some people who seem to recommend the STSADM (even though PowerShell is the Microsoft recommend way on SharePoint 2010) because it seems to work and not the give error that the PowerShell command does about feature dependency, but it looks like you can try either one.

And you may need to update your alternate access mappings to enable any custom URLs to work as well.