Renaming ISA Server 2000
By Simon Jorritsma

It is possible to rename your ISA Server. The firewall may need to be renamed because you are moving it from one location to another, or the machine was in a test and now needs to be moved to a production network, or because the machine is using a name that you want to assign to another machine. Whatever the reason, you want and need to rename the ISA firewall.

The good news is that it’s possible to rename your ISA firewall. It doesn’t matter if the firewall is a member of a domain or a standalone server. However, unless you rename the ISA firewall in the right way, some bad things can happen! There is a very specific procedure you need to go through before you can successfully rename the ISA Server 2000 firewall.

I will go over the procedures required to rename the ISA Server 2000.

Renaming the ISA Server 2000 Firewall

The basic procedure for renaming the ISA Server 2000 firewall includes the following:

1. Change the name of the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer and do not reboot
2. Open Regedit
3. Drill down to HKLM\Software\Microosft\Fpc\Arrays\{CurrentArrayGUID}\Servers\{CurrentServerGUID}
4. Edit the msfpcName and msfpcFQDN values to match the new name of the server
5. Reboot the ISA Server 2000 firewall machine

Change the Name of the ISA Server 2000 Firewall Computer

The first step is to rename the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer. Perform the following steps to rename the machine.:

1. On the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer, right click the My Computer object on the desktop and click Properties.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, click the Computer Name tab.
3. On the Computer Name tab, click the Change button.
4. In the Computer Name Changes dialog box, enter the new name in the Computer name text box. In this example, the old computer name was ISALEEUW and the new computer name is ISACHANGE. Click OK after changing the name.
5. Click OK in the Computer Name Changes dialog box informing you that you must restart the computer before the changes take effect.

6. Click OK in the System Properties dialog box.
7. Click OK in the System Properties dialog box.
8. Click No in the System Settings Change dialog box that asks if you want to restart the computer.
   
   
   Do not restart the firewall!

Change the Registry Values

The next step is to change the Registry values. Perform the following steps to change the appropriate Registry values on the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer:

1. Click Start and then click the Run command.
2. In the Run dialog box, enter Regedit in the Open text box and click OK.
3. In the Registry Editor, drill down to the following Registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fpc\Arrays\{CurrentArrayGUID}\Servers\{CurrentServerGUID}

4. In the right pane of the Registry Editor you will AND CAN see two values that have the old name of the ISA Server 2004 firewall. These are the msFPCFQDN and the msFPCName. Double click on each of these values, and then enter the new name in the dialog boxes. In this example, we are changing the name from ISALEEUW to ISACHANGE.
   
5. Now navigate to the following Registry Key
   HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fpc\Arrays\{CurrentArrayGUID}\
6. Change the values for the msFPRArrayName and the msFPCName entries to the new name. Again, in this example, we are changing the name from ISA1 to ISACHANGED.
   
7. Restart the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer.
    

You’ll find that after the restart that everything works correctly. The key to success is making the Registry changes before you restart the computer!