I was starting to deploy Exchange 2010 for a client today that contained a ‘.’ in their NETBIOS name when I came across a bug.   The majority of organizations will deploy an Active Directory environment using a single name for their NETBIOS domain name.  For example, ‘scottfeltmann.com’ would have a NETBIOS name of ‘scottfeltmann’ or ‘contoso.com’ would be ‘contoso’.  

I started out by running the Exchange 2010 Pre-Deployment Analyzer Tool.  No issues discovered.  I then deployed the Client Access Server role. No errors were reported during the installation of the CAS.  Upon the completion of the installation of the role I opened up the Exchange Management Console (EMC) clicked on the ‘Microsoft Exchange On-Premises’ option and got the following error:

Initialization failed

 “The following error occurred when getting user information from ‘domain.com\username’: 

The operation couldn’t be performed because the object ‘domain.com\username’ couldn’t be found on domaincontroller.domain.com.  It was running the command ‘Get-LogonUser’.

How odd, this isn’t normal.  I haven’t seen this in any other environment, but then again, I haven’t come across a netbios name with a ‘.’ in it.  At first I checked AD for any issues, thinking maybe there was a replication problem.  I did find one small problems, resolved it, tried again, same result. 

I then turned to my friend google. 

Doing some research I came across this article with the same problem: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/35384695/exchange-2010-period-in-n.aspx  a ‘.’ in the domain NETBIOS name.  Doing further digging I came across this article on StuartP’s blog which describes the issue: http://blogs.technet.com/stuartp/archive/2010/03/31/exchange-2010-and-netbios-domains-with-dotted-notations.aspx

Yup, looks like an identified bug in Exchange 2010 and it will not be fixed until Rollup 4.  I did install Rollup 3 (which was released April 9th) to see if that would help the situation but it didn’t.  I guess at this point it is a matter of waiting for Rollup 4 to be released…..Bugger!

—**UPDATE**—

Working with MS support I was informed that there is an unpublished KB article pertaining to this issue.  If you do have this problem you will need to contact MS Support and refer to KB 981033.  It is my understanding that there is a fix for Exchange 2010 RU 1 and Exchange 2010 RU 3,  I received the update for RU 3 and will be applying it to the server later today.  The size of the update was approx. 35megs. 

I need to point out that when installing this update you will need to remove it prior to deploying RU 4, which will have the fix in the RU 4 release.

Thanks MS Support for getting this guy out here!