Giving a Workgroup Server an FQDN

Recently I needed to be able to securely, remotely manage a set of Windows Servers that were not domain joined.  One problem that I hit while setting this up was that each of the servers did not believe that they had a valid FQDN.

For example – I could:

• Set the name of a computer to “HyperVSV1”
• Create a DNS entry that said that “HyperVSV1.mydomain.com” resolved to that computer
• I could then correctly ping the computer at that address

But when I tried to use tools like PowerShell Remoting or Remote Desktop – they would complain that “HyperVSV1.mydomain.com” did not believe it was “HyperVSV1.mydomain.com”.

Thankfully, this is relatively easy to fix.

If you open PowerShell and run the following two commands:

Set-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\" -Name Domain -Value "mydomain.com" Set-ItemProperty "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\" -Name "NV Domain" -Value "mydomain.com"

After this your workgroup server will correctly identify itself with a valid FQDN.

Cheers,
Ben

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2017
  Very helpful, thanks! I was wondering if there's an easy way to resolve the certificate warning for ages.
• Anonymous
  April 27, 2017
  The comment has been removed