"Jorge de Almeida Pinto [MVP - DS]"
I would never follow the "allowed" rules but use
much more restrictive guidelines:
Alphabetic first character, AlphaNumeric subsequent
Max 14 characters total*
Specifically no underscores, dots, leading numerics,
or anything else that is non-alphanumeric.
Using non-English characters for national language
installations of Windows is considered acceptable
but there is a (strong) possibility that interoperation
with other windows versions will be probablematic.
(Not impossible, just irritatingly complicated.)
Doing this will never cause a problem, but doing
anything else will cause problems in some cases
(some of which may be obsolete now, but why take
the chance.)
I follow the same rules for ANYTHING that will ever
(possibly) become a NetBIOS or (part of a) DNS name,
so Domains, Workgroups, Computers.
There is no reason not to follow this for OUs but there
I might be willing to use Underscores or other characters.
I break the rule in one specific case regularly: Template
user is "_UserCategoryName" (e.g., _Engineer) but this
is due to the fact that such template users will never
actually be used on the network but only for copying to
create a new user.
*All NetBIOS names are actually 16 characters (always)
as the OS extends Computer, User, Domain etc. names
to 15 characters with spaces and then uses the 16
character to represent different services (like IP does
with ports). One would then naively think (I did) that
15 characters would be acceptable but there have been
weird cases (e.g., something in MS SQL Server) where
even 15 was too long. Thus the restriction to 14
characters.
