Knowledge Base

Dcpromo Does Not Allow All-Numeric Label in a Domain Name

Article ID: 258101

Article Last Modified on 2/21/2007

APPLIES TO

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server

This article was previously published under Q258101

SYMPTOMS

The Active Directory Installation Wizard (Dcpromo) may display the following error message:

The syntax of the domain name 111.edu is incorrect.

In general, acceptable naming conventions for domain names include the use of alphanumeric characters (the letters A through Z and numerals 0 through 9) and the hyphen (-). A period (.) in a domain name is always used to separate the discrete parts of a domain name commonly known as labels. Each domain label can be no longer than 63 bytes. The first label may not be a number.

CAUSE

The call that Domain Name System (DNS) uses to validate names prevents the use of all-numeric labels to protect against the use of IP addresses as domain names and to guard against problems that all-numeric names can cause with NetBIOS. Note that a label is denoted by a period or a dot. For example, a label may be "111" or "edu". This is an important concept because the following hotfix allows all-numeric labels but not all-numeric domain names (such as 123456).

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

260910 How to Obtain the Latest Windows 2000 Service Pack

The English version of this fix should have the following file attributes or later:

   Date        Time    Size     File name
   -------------------------------------------------------
   04/10/2000  07:06a  261,518  Q258101_w2k_sp2_x86_en.exe

WORKAROUND

Create domain names that contain letters and numbers.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Windows 2000 Service Pack 2.

MORE INFORMATION

This naming restriction applies only to the Active Directory domain name; it does not apply to the DNS server service itself. Other restriction on Active Directory domain names are discussed in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:

245809 Windows 2000 Supports 64 UTF-8 Byte Fully Qualified Domain Names

237675 Setting Up the Domain Name System for Active Directory

Keywords: kbhotfixserver kbqfe kbbug kbfix KB258101

Microsoft KB Archive/258101

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