Attendee Position Papers
Large Scale System Administration of Windows NT Workshop
August 14-16, 1997
Seattle, Washington, USA
NATHAN ALBERTSON
Senior Stands Engineer
U S WEST Media Group
Shared Technology Organization
181 Inverness Drive West
Englewood, CO 80112
na@mezcla.com
303.643.2854 Voice
303.643.2599 FAX
At U S WEST Media Group, we are migrating networked applications and "print and file services" to NT servers. We are anticipating a network infrastructure that spans all the business units within the group and that unifies access to all networked resources. We currently are designing and planning the architecture and the interfaces with existing, and proposed, systems and processes. Eventually, this infrastructure will support on the order of twenty thousand users, distributed across most of the US and internationally.
The group has background and experience from many computing environments and perspectives. Our challenge is to build on those diverse strengths and plan the best possible support for the users.
BRIDGET ALLISON
Network Appliance Inc.
2770 San Tomas Expressway
Santa Clara, CA 95051
tel: 408 367 3419
fax: 408 367 3151
bridget@netapp.com
I'm a technical marketing engineer working on integration issues around UNIX and NT file sharing - with specific reference to the CIFS protocol spec. I see NT as Microsoft's implementation of that spec and my company sell file servers that provide both nfs and cifs access to a common file system. I am particularly interested in the authentication and security-related aspects of NT and am working on ways to unify UNIX and NT authentication, looking particularly at Kerberos and ldap.
ERIC ANDERSON
eanders@cs.berkeley.edu
At our site, we are currently integrating NT into our primarily UNIX research environment. We have not yet found a solution with adequate security for connecting the NT and the UNIX filesystems. We also have not fully dealt with the problem of accessing other UNIX resources from an NT desktop or vice versa. Finally, we have been having substantial problems with the administration of NT (much of which is supposed to be fixed in NT 5.0), in particular, there is a substantial amount of work that each user needs to perform to get applications to work, and the environment available is substantially less uniform than in UNIX.
The second piece we are looking at is building large clusters of NT machines as a follow-on to the network of workstations research we have been doing at Berkeley. Here we are looking at how people should access the resources, and what is necessary for us to perform similar research on NT. We are trying to answer the question "what is the benefit/costs for research on NT as opposed to research on UNIX."
KARL A. ANDERSON
EMSL System Administrator
Battelle PNNL
Box 999, MSIN K8-91
Richland, WA 99352
Voice: 509-376-5382
FAX: 509-376-0420
Karl.Anderson@pnl.gov
We support a primarily-UNIX group within a primarily-Windows company. We need to access Windows office-automation apps, particularly MS-Exchange. We're using Citrix WinFrame to make MS apps available to the UNIX desktops.
We are also trying to integrate Windows computers into our DCE-based security architecture.
ALAN ATKINSON
alan.atkinson@gs.com
8th Floor
85 Broad St.
New York, NY 10004
(212) 902-2176
We (Goldman, Sachs & Co.) are in the midst of a very large scale (potentially 5000 workstations) global NT rollout. As the environment continues to grow, issues arise both with NT support and with integrating NT with our UNIX environment. In particular:
NT:
- How do we do efficient global software and OS updates?
- How do we manage servers/workstations remotely?
UNIX/NT integration:
- How do we merge home directories, passwords, etc. - do we bother?
- How do we handle users who need both NT and UNIX apps on their desktop?
- How do we merge print and mail infrastructure - again, do we bother?
At present, we've managed to successfully merge backup and monitoring across the NT and UNIX platforms. We're still examining the other issues.
ALICIA F. BALSERA
Associate Director Academic Computing
University of South Florida
4202 East Fowler Avenue, LIB 618
Tampa, Florida 33620-5453
Voice: (813) 974-1782
Fax: (813) 974-1799
alicia@usf.edu
The University of South Florida, a dynamic metropolitan university located along Florida's West Coast, serves the needs of more than 36,000 students.
Academic Computing provides computing services and resources in direct support of instruction and research. There are several locations on campus where small computers are maintained in open access labs. The configuration for these open access labs is based on Windows NT servers and Windows 95 clients.
These labs also provide access to the second tier computing facilities and the Internet. Second tier facilities include multiple-processors UNIX systems, in addition to a variety of other UNIX servers, operated by the Colleges and Academic Computing.
BONNIE BERTELSON
System Administrator
Motorola Cellular Infrastructure Group
IL27-3B6
1501 W. Shure Drive
Arlington Heights, Illinois 60004
bertlsnb@cig.mot.com
Phone: (847) 435-9788
Fax: (847) 632-6658
I am on the CIG Global Windows NT Project Team, focusing on the design of a Windows NT network architecture that unifies the CIG network globally. The project team is dedicated to designing and implementing a Windows NT architecture that works as one global network, integrated into the existing UNIX network.
The goal of any computer department is to provide end users with a computing environment which will help make their job function easier, more accurate and efficient. The current environment has performed well for the users, but changing needs and work habits, as well as changes in the desktop market, are requiring CIG to rethink some of its computer architecture strategy.
The engineering computing environment for CIG, has long been primarily composed of a UNIX infrastructure consisting of X-terminals and desktop workstations. This environment serves the engineering community well, because UNIX is the main development platform used to build the Motorola cellular infrastructure business.
However, for the majority of the non-engineering community, the office desktop environment has been primarily composed of a Macintosh infrastructure consisting of desktop and laptop computers. But those environments are no longer proving to be suitable for the growing user base wanting or requiring a more standardized, compatible and widely supportable environment.
Part of what we are doing with NT is transitioning the non-engineering community from the Macintosh to the NT platform and providing access to the UNIX servers as necessary. We are also deploying Net Appliances, using CIFS, for engineers who have need to develop on the Windows NT platform for our customers - thus providing "home" space for UNIX or NT users on the same machine (disk farm).
One problem is that CIG has three main platforms which need to share files/information - UNIX, Macintosh and NT - and I have not found a solution that covers file sharing on all three platforms. I hope this workshop will provide some direction for resolving this situation.
JOSEPH BOYER JR.
Fuji Capital Markets Corp.
2 World Trade Center
80 Floor
NY, NY 10048
Phone #: (212)898-2884
boyer@fcmc.com
I have been working with NT on trading floors of various banks for the past few years and I am currently beginning an integration of UNIX and NT on Fuji's trading floor. One of my main concerns is how to integrate smoothly NT's and Solaris' name spaces. A product we are looking at to accomplish the matter is Uname It. The product proposes that it is will give one centralized database of user id's, hostnames, IP addresses, etc. Currently the NT client has not been release, but from demos and beta products their claim seems to be true.
Another issue is NT security and how Microsoft intends and how it has implemented security into its operating system. Question that are of interested are: Is there a way to integrate both Solaris' and NT security schema. If there, what is the best way to approach this or if not, how can we accomplish a close nit security schema with the least amount of administration.
We are currently using NT v4.0 server and workstation and we also have a few Win95 machines in the domain. The company will be using a multiple domain model, i.e., each major office will have its own PDC and will be the administrator of its own domain. We are doing this to be consistent with our UNIX domain setup.
A few other concerns is the stability of the operating systems and its installed services and how it relates to the operating system's performance. I raise this issue because I have seen performance issues arise with both workstations and servers that have been up for an extended period of time. Is there a recommended amount of time a machine should be up before it is rebooted to refresh the system. Or is this an environment specific issue.
Lastly the future of NT. We all have seen NT 5.0 beta and what Microsoft promise with it, but what lies beyond NT 5.0 and how will effect our current hardware, apps, etc.
JAMES J. BOZEK
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.
moleman@sequent.com
550 Kirkland Way, ste 264
Kirkland, WA 98033
Phone: (425) 739-2060
URL: www.sequent.com
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. manufactures and delivers large scale, multiprocessor computer systems that address the needs of large data centers. There are two areas of relevant focus:
NT on cc-NUMA
The Sequent Symmetry product line has been based upon a Symmetrical Multi-Processor (SMP) architecture (2-32 processors) leveraging commodity components (e.g., Intel Pentium CPUs). These systems were delivered with a Sequent-developed scaleable UNIX, DYNIX/ptx.
Last year, Sequent introduced a new product line called the NUMA-Q 2000. In contrast to a large bus SMP architecture, the NUMA-Q 2000 is a scaleable hardware product based upon a Pentium Pro cache-coherent Non Uniform Memory Architecture (cc-NUMA) using a 4-processor building block. Dynix/ptx was modified and enhanced to efficiently support the NUMA-Q 2000 architecture. NT scalability and performance is being investigated with
respect to cc-NUMA architectures. Of particular concern are issues of I/O distribution and scheduling, memory management, and processor allocation.
Mixed NT and UNIX (DYNIX/ptx)
Heterogeneous environments raise issues of system management, resource sharing, and system control. The range of tools and products in both environments is constantly growing which creates a challenge in delivering customer oriented management and control capabilities. Relevant issues in such an environment include: the integration of UNIX and NT, file sharing, fault tolerance, application services, user administration, serviceability, security, and reliability.
MICHAEL R. BROWN
Windows NT Core Administrator
Engineering Computing, Motorola, Inc, Land Mobil Products Sector
8000 W Sunrise Blvd, M/S 2426 Plantation, FL 33322
Phone: 954-723-2969, Fax 954-723-4753
brownmic@comm.mot.com
At our site we design and manufacture two-way radios. We have traditionally had software engineers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers on various UNIX platforms, including HP-UX, SunOS, Solaris, and a few others. In addition, we have other users (administrative, managerial, and the like) on Macintosh systems. Because of the Macintoshes, our UNIX people are forced to use Macintosh emulator like MAE or Liken to deal with email and files exchanged with them. In the last year, we've started to move some of our users off of Macintoshes and UNIX systems to Windows NT systems. It first started only for our Software Engineers, but other groups have also looked at or wanted to move toward Windows NT. At present we have some 300+ Windows NT systems, along with some Windows NT servers to prove certain services, like mail. We currently have an Exchange server and will soon have an SMS server. However, as we have invested a large amount into UNIX servers, these still exist as serve as fileservers for our NT users, keeping home and project directories there, as well as serving as build servers and X servers for those UNIX apps that don't (or maybe never) be ported to NT.
I serve as the Windows NT Core Administrator, responsible for our NT servers and the overall NT infrastructure. I am also responsible for the Exchange server and will be one of the people responsible for the SMS server. My position is as a 'second line' support for our systems, backing up our 'Local Windows NT Admins'. Among some of the projects I have been involved with and continue to be involved with in our migration is the development of NT Support Processes, our installed Windows NT Workstation Baseline, and our Windows NT Domain Architecture.
CHARLES H. BUCHHOLTZ
Manager of Systems Programming
School of Engineering and Applies Science
University of Pennsylvania
chip@seas.upenn.edu
200 S. 33rd St.
Phila. PA 19104-6314
ph/fax: (215) 898-2491 / (215) 898-1195
The engineering school has about 3000 computer users (students, faculty, and staff). We run NT in our public PC labs which are used primarily by students (approximately 150 machines). We also run NT in the business offices. Faculty and staff desktops run whatever they want, often Windows 3.1 or Macintosh.
Benefits from running NT:
public labs: they want PCs, we want access control to lock down machines. NT's administrative overhead is balanced with the reduced software maintenance cost (because we don't have to re-install the OS twice a week per machine).
business offices: they want PCs and stability, we want them to be able to manage them themselves. NT works out well -- they have file permissions and the business offices all have NT, so they can share whatever they feel like whenever they feel like without contacting us.
Customizations done to NT:
public labs: WinBatch & Perl provide us a login system for NT 3.51 that uses our existing UNIX credentials. WinInstall keeps us from having to install new applications on all 120+ PCs.
Business offices: Central backups nightly using Retrospect. Retrospect lets us push restores right back on to the machine they came from.
PAM BUFFINGTON
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta GA 30332-0280
Ph: 404-894-4796
Fx: 404-894-9826
pamc@cc.gatech.edu
Much of the College of Computing's freshman and sophomore curriculum is being reworked, both to bring it more in line with industry trends and as part of a conversion of the entire curriculum from quarters to semesters. Windows NT has been chosen as the operating system environment that will be used to support this portion of the curriculum, with Java serving as the initial programming language to which students are exposed. A number of multimedia, graphics, telecommunications, software engineering, educational technology, and parallel processing classes are also experimenting with using the NT environment, either as a replacement or in addition to the existing UNIX environments.
Within less than a year, our installed base of Intel PC's has gone from about 25 to more than 150, with an additional 200 expected before the end of the calendar year, with most of this 300+ systems resulting from donations of equipment from Intel in support of instruction and research. The most recent gift will replace all 150 Ph.D. student desktops (currently X terminals) with PC's. Since the Intel PC is essentially a new platform for the College and one that is experiencing explosive growth, it presents many problems and opportunities. After much study and discussion, as well as consultation with peers in industry and academe, it has been decided that only Windows NT and Solaris x86 will be supported on this platform, both to which we have been granted source code access.
Faced with having to bring a large number of new systems of a new architecture into the computing infrastructure quickly with only one additional staff member and no net decrease in the number of other computing platforms (350+ Sun and SGI workstations, 150+ Macintoshes), we decided early on that this was going to be impossible unless we could add the NT systems in such a fashion as to build on our existing infrastructure and expertise. Further, the NT systems would have to integrate/interoperate fully with this existing infrastructure, both for the sake of the users as well as our own. This must include (in parenthesis is our current, possibly partial or kludgy, solution):
- sharing/availability across all environments of user home directories that are distributed throughout the College network (distributed Samba servers, with user home directories required to be on UNIX NFS hosts)
- centralized single username, password, and access permissions that are manipulable using our existing homebrew account management system and centralized user account database (beta NIS and PDC extensions to NCD's WinCenter server product, along with some local kludges, allow us to control NT username, password, home directory, rudimentary access restrictions, etc. on the PDC's and SDC's via NIS maps maintained on UNIX hosts)
- utilization of existing backup infrastructure (added to existing Mac backups using Retrospect, with both possibly transitioning to Legato in the future)
- utilization of our current systems administration/automation paradigms - e.g. standard system installs, automated nightly/on-demand updates and patches, etc. (in progress, using scripts and methods similar to existing)
- utilization of distributed, shared application servers with "floating" shared licenses (using existing Sassafras License server [for Mac] for NT application license checkout in combination with distributed, shared NT application servers)
Even though many of our vendors (especially on the NT side) cannot seem to understand why we would want this level of integration/interoperation, we're perhaps 95% there using our first-cut solutions to many of these problems, although many are quite kludgy. We have already achieved a level of integration which we believe (based on our contacts with some other sites) is still pretty rare and we have survived the first wave of 150 systems, but there are still gaps and we don't yet have a good idea how well it will scale to the next 300. Further, we hope there may be better freeware or commercial solutions that others either have developed or have planned in the near term which may prove to be better or more standard, especially as relates to the second and fourth of the five points above.
NANCY JOHNSON BURR
Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
burr@cs.washington.edu
(206)543-2371
(206)543-2969 (fax)
We've been a dyed-in-the-wool UNIX shop, but have recently had an influx of NT systems and are feeling the integration and migration pains. A lot of our undergrad courses are migrating towards NT, as are a lot of the faculty/staff desktop computing and some of our research projects, yet our basic infrastructure support still relies heavily on UNIX.
I'm mainly interested in the integration/co-existence issues related to UNIX and NT, NT security issues, how other groups manage the mix of large shared computing labs and a large base of private desktop systems, and the issues and options for remote system management of a large installed base of NT systems.
DAVID BUTLER
Texas Instruments, Inc. (commercial)
13510 North Central Expressway
Dallas, Texas 75243
dbutler@ti.com
Phone: 972/927-1427
FAX: 972/995-3966
My current duties include direct support of 65 NT workstations, in addition to 35 HP and Sun platforms and indirect support of 700+ NT workstations/servers, comprised of operating system installations/upgrades, application installation/upgrades, problem analysis and troubleshooting and customer training. Our present installation deals mainly with Engineering Design Automation(EDA) applications as well as mainstream PC applications that are of the 16bit genre and cause the majority of our problems(lockups and crashes).
GERALD CARTER
Engineering Network Services
103-L Building
Auburn University
Auburn, AL, 36849
jerry@eng.auburn.edu
phone: (334) 844 - 2280
fax: (334) 844 - 4034
Our current Network configuration consists of 400+ Sun workstations, 650+ PC's running a mixture NFS clients ( DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 ) and approximately 50 Macintosh systems. Within the past year, we have upgraded several student PC labs to a Windows 95 / Samba configuration. Several more upgrades are in the near future.
The emergence of the Windows 95/NT ( Microsoft) Networking have forced us to address new twists to such issues as user authentication, file system security, process security, stability and remote administration. Our goal is to provide a secure, distributed computing environment for both faculty and students.
With a current support staff of six full time positions and two half-time ones, it would be impossible to maintain a network of individual, independent machines. We hope that by being able to integrate existing PC clients with a Solaris based infrastructure, we can satisfy the needs ( and wants ) of our users without compromising security or stability.
MARCO CECCHETTO
Platinum Solutions, Inc.
11100 NE 8th St., Suite 400
Bellevue, WA 98004
Tel. 425-688-9456, FAX 425-688-9497
marco_cecchetto@platsol.com
I am currently administrating a small network of about 50 machines. The supported platforms are a mix of Intel-based boxes with 6-7 SPARCstations and 3-4 NeXTStep boxes. The local OS's are NT4.0, Solaris 2.4 & 2.5, NeXTStep 3.x and 4.x, and Windows95. Most of the work done here is OpenStep related. The infrastructure is UNIX-based. WindowsNT was added in acknowledgment of client requirements. Despite the rabid attitudes of the local developers, NT WILL become a major element in this network in the near future and the challenge (now and later) is to integrate the various elements of the network to support all project efforts .
DAVID CHINN
chinn@zso.dec.com
Actually, this is more of an information gathering exercise.
I work for a vendor: digital equipment corporation, and I'm interested in hearing about the problems that systems administrators are currently having with administering very large scale sites.
RICHARD CHYCOSKI
Simon Fraser University
Academic Computing Services
Burnaby, B.C.
Canada
richard@sfu.ca
Voice: +1-604-291-4715
Fax: +1-604-291-4242
I need to find a solution to get @#^%#$^ NT to live peacefully in large, heterogeneous sites that have no central organisation, but very mobile users! (a.k.a.: Universities. :-)
We're attempting to use Novell NDS for NT services to facilitate the combination of a large group of "inseparable" users (17,000 students and 3000 faculty and staff) along with a plethora of independent fiefdoms (50+ departments) where an individual expects to be able to drop in and get their "central" environment along with the "departmental" environment (and maybe several other "departmental" environments), and hopefully leave the computer in a usable running state when they sign off.
(Was that a long enough run-on sentence? :-)
NDS has not yet proven to be the "silver bullet" that we had hoped, since it does not solve the "multiple personality" aspect of our problem, but it does make it possible to handle large numbers of accounts in a central (read: lower maintenance) fashion. Until we see Microsoft's solution (with distributed replicated databases), we intend to beat NDS into shape to provide this functionality.
PAUL CLARK
Computer Specialist
Naval Postgraduate School
clarkp@cs.nps.navy.mil
other: 833 Dyer Rd., Code CS
Monterey, CA 93943
office: (408) 656-2395
FAX: (408) 656-2814
I am representing the Computer Security Track of the Computer Science Department of the Naval Postgraduate School. I manage all the lab systems used for both teaching and research. Windows NT is a new addition to the lab, dominated mostly by different variants of UNIX. Because the Navy has declared that they will be using Windows NT, we have started to purchase a number of NT workstations and servers. We need to become more familiar with the issues that our students will be faced with as they transition to NT, with an emphasis on the security aspects of such installations.
SUSAN COGHLAN
Center for Adaptive Systems Applications
901 18th St., #210
Los Alamos, NM 87544
smc@lacasa.com
phone: 505-662-6820x114
fax: 505-662-0095
We recently started moving to WinNT from win95 and UNIX platforms. The transition has been painful, partially due to lack of WinNT expertise, partially due to the users coming from the win95 the-user-is-root security(not) model and the admins coming from the UNIX security model. We are still struggling with how to set up security permissions so that the system and the user are protected but the user can still get work done. We are also struggling with how to administrate WinNT boxes that are located in geographically separate areas but which must all be administrated by the few over-worked admins at the main office. We need tools to automate installs, upgrades, fixes. We need tools to help us figure out how to set ACLs to maximize security and minimize user frustration. We need tools to fix the stupid registry which keeps becoming corrupted for who knows what reasons. Integration is always difficult but with samba we feel we at least have a handle on file integration. We currently use WinCenter to integrate application for the UNIX machines but we need better integration for the WinNT boxes into the UNIX application world.
ARIEL COHEN
General manager, Sela Systems and lecturer at Tel-Aviv University, Computer Science department, School of Mathematical Sciences
Contact Address: Sela Systems, 10 Hakishon St. Bnei-Brak, Israel 51203
Phone: +972-3-6190999
Fax: +972-3-6190992
aco@sela.co.il
Web: https://www.sela.co.il/
My involvement with Windows NT includes the following research and projects:
* Merging UNIX and NT User Administration, authentication, authorization, etc.
* Development and deployment of system monitoring tools for Windows NT.
* Configuration of computer classes based on diskless (or dataless) Win95/NT workstations served by both NT and UNIX servers.
* Merging UNIX and NT software development environments, including Configuration Management tools and methods.
The above mentioned research and projects are conducted mainly within Sela Systems, partly as a result of our customers' needs and partly as an attempt to provide new products and services to our customers. Sela Systems provides consulting and support services in networking and system administration for UNIX, Windows95, Windows NT and Novell. Our services include consultation and guidance regarding secure Internet connectivity, secure administration of internal networks, establishing and maintaining system and network administrative procedures, defining and implementing networked information systems. Sela Systems also operates as a technical information and knowledge center on networking and system administration through objective client oriented surveys and product assessment.
GARY CROWELL
Texas Instruments/DSEG/DCS/System Senior Support Analyst
crowell@fletcher.dseg.ti.com
Voice: 214-575-3427
FAX: 214-575-2628
USMail: Texas Instruments M/S 8405,
6500 Chase Oaks Blvd, Plano, TX 75023
I am one of the persons responsible for the deployment/support of a series of NT systems, our UNIX customers use to access NT applications. The system is called PCAS or Personal Computer Application Server. Briefly, the PCAS services offered our customers, in a multi-user environment, are:
1. compute server,
2. user login authentication/management,
3. user UNIX home directory access (U: drive),
4. user NT profile access,
5. print services, and
6. application access.
I have already worked through the following NT issues:
1. controlling access to the C: drive with multiple applications,
2. accessing Print services in another domain, and
3. accessing applications, from an application server, also
in another domain and all the related problems associated
with the "guest" permissions.
With the next release of PCAS, I am looking for the knowledge, to assist me in working the following NT issues:
1. system error monitoring with the end result a morning report summarizing system activity/problems over the previous 24 hours sent as a mail message to a UNIX account,
2. a user PCAS profile stored in a file, ".pcas", that will seamlessly setup what ever is needed by a customer's work environment (analogous to .openwin-init) like connecting drives, etc., and
3. proactive system event management with the end product a mechanism to look for problems and once detected, correct or notify someone via email or pager.
LAURA CURTIS
Laura.Curtis@pnl.gov
Battelle PNNL
PO Box 999
K7-28
Richland, WA 99352
(509)375-2311
I am a fairly new user of NT. I have been a UNIX system administrator/developer for the last 7 years. I am currently on a highly visible project that runs on two UNIX platforms and is going to start porting to Windows NT in the next couple months.
The project is to develop a portable 3D Ultrasound/telemedicine system for the DOD. The DOD uses NT quite extensively and we feel that the users of our system would feel more comfortable using this operating system.
We have already received awards and recognition for the versions we have running on the UNIX platforms and hope to make it as successful on the NT platform.
KRIS CUTAIA
Manager, Systems & Operations
Anadarko Petroleum Corp.
17001 Northchase Drive
Houston, Texas 77060
(281) 876-8645
kris_cutaia@anadarko.com
Anadarko is an Oil and Gas Exploration company. Our environment consists of approximately 70 UNIX and NT servers and approximately 1500 PC's running NT on the desktops. We have a WAN with three T1 lines from Houston to London, Liberal and Midland. Our Network Operating System is NT running mostly on COMPAQ 5000s.
I along with two other people do the system administration for all of the UNIX database servers and will soon be moving some of the Sybase Databases to SQL Server on NT and doing the NT System Administration for these as well.
To date, we have used NT for the desktop, for the network operating system, file servers and print servers. We have NOT used NT for database servers yet. We are going to move all of our UNIX/Sybase databases to NT/SQL Server. These applications are mission critical and I have several concerns about whether or not NT is ready to house large databases for departmental mission critical systems. Our user community is used to having 99% availability on HP UNIX and Sybase systems. I am at the point where I believe I need to buy a redundant server in order to ensure this level of service. I am also concerned about having 50 simultaneous users hitting a database at one time and am looking at what tools are available for stress testing an NT/SQL Server system. I am also concerned that most benchmarks with NT as a database server are generated on NT systems with 3 GB of memory. My UNIX systems run very large databases with 256 MB of memory just fine. I am interested to find out if other people have seen a need to put larger amounts of memory on NT than they are used to putting on UNIX. If so, what is it about NT that requires so much more memory for databases? Is this how they have managed to get the benchmark numbers they have? How do you size an NT machine based on the UNIX machine it will replace. I am also interested in backup strategies and how a "used to be mainframe" operators can be used in an NT environment.
ANN TRUMP DANIEL
Macmillan Computer Publishing
Executive Editor
512-349-2865
Fax: 512-349-2825
adaniel@texas.net
4212 Cat Hollow Drive
Austin, Texas 78731
I am an Executive Editor responsible for developing a series of books for systems administrators faced with managing an NT installation. This conference will give me an opportunity to learn about the key issues and to talk with professionals dealing with NT.
HARRY DELANO
delano@cs.Buffalo.EDU
Computer Science
SUNY Buffalo
I am planning on attending two Windows NT workshops from 8/11-8/16 in Seattle: USENIX Windows NT Workshop and Large Scale System Administration of Windows NT Workshop.
I am attending these workshops from the perspective of someone familiar with UNIX as a way of being introduced to Windows NT administration and software development. I have been doing UNIX Systems Administration and software development for about 15 years and have not yet done much with Windows.
As for the workshop for researchers, I think I will get exposure to issues such as Windows NT software development and considerations of upwards scalability of NT with respect to various scenarios. This will be valuable involvement I might have in scientific applications implementation, large database systems and distributed operating system research and application implementation and consultation. It will also directly relate to a research project I will be involved in, where various distributed systems approaches will be compared (DCOM, DCE and CORBA). A copy of the abstract for a research grant proposal that Bina Ramamurthy, a faculty member in CS, has submitted to NSF is attached. I will be involved in this project at several levels. This project will also benefit me in that I am actively involved in a campus-wide group (Distributed Computing Working Group) which is a vehicle for evaluation and recommendation as my University considers various distributed computing approaches.
Abstract: Interoperability and Security Features for Open Distributed Computing
The main goal of this research is to study the features needed to build a highly interoperable and secure architecture for open distributed computing. Open distributed computing refers to collaborative computing among many large, independent distributed computing environments. Such systems are commonly used in a wide range of application areas including mobile computing, simulation, design automation, enterprise-wide integrated computing, just to mention a few prominent ones. Distributed computing infrastructures offer virtually unlimited connectivity and accessibility to information. Connectivity is exploited to provide collaboration among the distributed components of the system. Such collaboration relies heavily on the extent of interoperability among the various components of the distributed system. Moreover, security is extremely critical for establishing trust among the interoperable environments and for warding off the vulnerability brought about by distributed control of resources. The two highly inter-dependent issues, namely, interoperability and security are the focus of this proposal.
A new interoperability protocol will be defined. It will specify how to field a request from a client, validate the request, select the appropriate server using the directory services, and translate and delegate the request to the selected server. The approach that will be used in realizing the interoperability protocol is to extend the facilities and services of currently available middleware packages. A prototype ODC architecture will be designed and developed to test the protocol. Three different environments (i) DCE on Solaris, (ii) CORBA on Solaris and (iii) DCOM on Windows NT have been selected to build the prototype. Specific issues to be addressed in this research include: (i) mechanisms for realizing interoperability, and (ii) mechanisms for handling insecurity that arises due to interoperation, and (iii) reducing the security checking overheads. Extensive performance evaluation under various request patterns, optimal client-server configurations, load balancing and scalability are some issues that will be addressed in the future extensions of the proposed research.
This research has other broader goals with educational connotations. These goals are: (i) involving undergraduates in scientific research, (ii) incorporation of topics of current interest in undergraduate curriculum using special projects, and (iii) building a model distributed systems laboratory.
DAN DOROUGH
Systems Specialist
IT-DCAS
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA 95616
Phone: (916)752-3420
dadorough@ucdavis.edu
We are considering Windows NT as a base platform for communication servers, specifically unattended servers in phone closets, communications huts, and other unmonitored locations. We are also interested in using NT as a research base for application protocols over TCP, with the potential to deploy research or production applications comparatively quickly to individuals with Windows NT or Windows 95 desktops.
I am especially interested in using NT for large numbers (200-500) of concurrent application protocol server processes for everything from POP, SMTP, WHOIS, and LDAP to custom protocols for managing network equipment. I am most keenly interested in learning about managing a large population of usernames (10000-50000) in a single NT registry, using custom-built tools we develop.
BECKY DOWELL
Wang / I-Net
MS INI-18
Kennedy Space Center, FL 32899
phone (407) 867-6766
fax (407) 867-6933
Becky.Dowell-1@kmail.ksc.nasa.gov
MARK PAGE
Wang / I-Net
MS INI-18
Kennedy Space Center, FL 32899
phone (407) 867-6767
fax (407) 867-6933
Mark.Page-1@kmail.ksc.nasa.gov
We are in the final stages of developing a Wide Area Network Security Gateway (WSG). The WSG filters and/or monitors network traffic, and logs traffic data. The development of WSG has given us experience in many areas of NT, including development from the kernel level to the application level, and administration of MS SQL Server and MS Internet Information Server. WSG was initially built under Windows NT 3.51, and is currently being ported to NT 4.0 The WSG software consists of a kernel mode driver, built over the NDIS layer. The kernel mode driver receives packets from the NDIS layer, filters them based on an access list, and passes traffic data up to a user mode Win32 application. The user mode application is a Winsock UDP client, which sends the traffic data to a Winsock UDP server residing on another machine. The UDP server dumps the traffic data to a text file, which is imported into MS SQL Server. Network managers search the traffic data via a web based interface.
We were also involved in the migration of approximately 100 NT domains to a centralized NT master domain. We are currently in the process of migrating the Kennedy Space Center mail system to MS Exchange 4.0 and 5.0. This migration involves moving various disparate mail systems to a centralized Exchange service. Approximately 10,000 clients will be migrated over a one year period. Our involvement has ranged from system and network design to client installation and configuration.
KSC currently has several different directory services. We are researching using NT to develop a directory services architecture that will integrate messaging, security, and network objects directory services.
In the near future, we plan to research real time OS for windows NT for space station and space shuttle check out launch control systems.
STEVE DOWNS
Qualcomm Incorporated
sdowns@qualcomm.com
We are currently focusing on implementing SMS for our enterprise. We have about 3000 NT workstations and are looking for a way to easily manage those systems causing as little disruption to the end user as possible. Providing an easy way to distribute software to users who do not have Local Admin will be a great benefit.
Another area we are looking into is setting up highly available servers on NT. These would primarily be database and web servers. We are looking to WolfPack to provide that functionality.
JAMES N. DUNCAN
Manager, Network and Information Systems
Applied Research Laboratory
Penn State University
Jim.Duncan@psu.edu
P.O. Box 30
State College PA 16804-0030
+1 814 863 8310
FAX: +1 814 863 7843
We're just getting started trying to gauge the number and capabilities of the NT machines in our environment, how they are used, and the experience level of the associated sysadmins, if any. There are well over 1000 computers at our lab, spread out in multiple buildings and remote sites. We're a Navy research lab, so security of the machines is very important.
I hope to organize and automate much of the routine work regarding host names, domain names, NT hostnames, NT domain names, printing and file services, trusted third-party authentication, remote audit, inventory, license administration, and message notification. I'm also attempting to write most of our in-house network tools in perl (with output in HTML) to make them easily portable to NT machines.
In particular, an honors student has selected as a project the development of an automated network service monitoring system that displays status via clickable HTML-based maps. Part of our proof of usefulness is test it on NT and make certain it is portable between it and UNIX. Another project is to provide a cohesive umbrella environment to merge services with NT and UNIX machines, perhaps by starting with samba to provide shared file services between the two platforms (the two "worlds", really). The next step would be to provide, or execute, a security assessment tool like cops or satan, etc., on each machine to evaluate its level of security, patch level, installed software and hardware, and so on.
Ambitious, I'm sure.
MICKEY ELLINGER
Electrical Engineering/Computer Science
UC Berkeley
330 Soda Hall
Berkeley CA 94720
mickey@eecs.berkeley.edu
We run the instructional computing labs for the Computer Science and Engineering courses at a university. Traditionally, we have run UNIX workstation clusters on Ethernet for most programming and simulation applications, and PCs on Novell LANs for dedicated controllers and smaller programs.
In the last year we have moved PCs in to the workstation labs, because they are now powerful enough to run UNIX and NT for our course software. The open market for WINTEL hardware and software makes the PCs very appealing. NT 4.0 has great applications and a consistent user interface, so it is increasingly in demand here. We sys admins worry about the security (ActiveX, how to control use of the C: drive, ...) and maintenance (how to distribute software and keep public-access NT workstations consistent).
OREN ESHEL
System Administrator
E*TRADE Group, Inc.
4 Embarcadero Place
2400 Geng Rd
Palo Alto, CA 94303
oeshel@etrade.com
oeshel@mail.wenet.net
tel: 415-842-2495
fax: 415-842-2525
E*TRADE Group, Inc., provides internet-based financial services for individual investors/consumers. Over the past year, E*TRADE has migrated its internal users, spread over two primary locations in California as well as several secondary domestic and international sites, to Windows NT for basic file and print sharing functions, host connections, and Web and database applications.
Over the next year, E*TRADE is looking to enhance its LAN environment for more efficient administration, increased user services, and greater security/reliability. Issues that E*TRADE will be dealing with include enterprise backup, automated desktop software distribution and maintenance, server clustering and failover, distributed and/or replicated file systems, and tools for creating Web and database applications. In addition, E*TRADE will be working to integrate services that reside on either UNIX or NT servers, such as name services, system backups, and security; to create a unified development environment; and to build an infrastructure for delivering sound and video to the desktop over the corporate intranet.
E*TRADE is also looking at the feasibility of migrating its existing customer applications from UNIX and VMS environments to Windows NT as well as developing new applications to run on the Windows NT platform. The same challenges for the internal environment, outlined above, will also be encountered in the customer environment, particularly the replication and failover of distributed databases and file systems. Running large scale applications on NT will require taking a different approach to hardware and software and scaling the environment to a higher level.
I am looking to understand the current and developing technologies geared toward addressing these issues and comparing what other organizations have done with the approaches that E*TRADE has taken to date.
NATHAN EVANS
Data Protection Analyst
Data Protection Distributed Systems
Federal Express Corporation
5550 Tech Center Drive
Colorado Springs, CO 80919
Tel: 719-262-1268
Fax: 719-599-5011
Pgr: 800-609-4895
nevans@fedex.com
URL: https://www.fedex.com
Federal Express is researching issues regarding large-scale implementation of Windows NT and how it compares to a UNIX operating system. Our work in Windows NT is in its infancy; we have more questions than answers. I hope that by attending this workshop these issues will be addressed.
Scalability - how many servers can be incorporated into a domain and how many domains can a cooperation effectively manage.
Maintainability - can large or multiple domains be effectively maintained.
Administration
File permissions - how does NTFS stack up against a UNIX file system.
Accounts - user permissions, Administrator v. Root
Operating System - robustness and=20
Security - operating system flaws, accountability, and auditing issues.
REMY EVARD
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 South Cass Ave
Argonne, IL 60439
evard@mcs.anl.gov
https://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/evard
630-252-5963
I am the manager of Advanced Computing and Networking in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Lab. We are a research institution, with a primary focus on scientific computation, typically on supercomputers. We also do work in advanced visualization, high-performance networking, and collaboration. We have been a UNIX shop for many years now, but we have jumped heavily onto the NT bandwagon. A year ago we had perhaps 5 NT machines, now we have closer to 100; they are very much a part of our production environment, but we can't manage them as well as we can our UNIX machines.
I am involved in a number of projects with NT:
- We are building a parallel computing cluster out of NT boxes in order to compare commodity-based supercomputing to the more traditional style that we currently use. I am presenting some of our systems administration experiences with this set of machines at the workshop.
- The number of NT machines in our division has increased rather dramatically during the last year. I'm interested in issues of integration, remote and centralized administration, and scalability. We've learned a great deal about these areas recently and are looking forward to sharing experiences with other.
- Several research projects in our division are porting code to NT. We are finding that managing NT machines for research is more difficult than UNIX machines (both for us and the researchers) due to the infinite tweakability of the NT machines and the desire of most NT applications to be installed locally on the machine rather than on a network server, among others things. I'm hoping that people in similar situations will have solutions for these kinds of problems.
WILLIAM FIGUEROA
Mentor Graphics Corp.
27788 SW Parkway Ave
Wilsonville, Or 97070
Phone: 503-685-1644
Fax: 503-685-7986
willie_figueroa@mentorg.com
We are just beginning to organize our PC's in our environment. Currently we have a very simple layout (one PDC, one BDC, one Distribution server, about 100 client PCs ). The company will soon begin to ramp up the PC count and consequently, we'll change from an almost casual PC administration to something more serious and complex. Still our UNIX boxes far out number our PC's in our development environment but that will not be the case for long.
The problems we are currently encountering is how to manage a growing population of PC desktops, and what tools or concepts to bring in help administer them. SMS looks promising, samba/pcnfs is troubling, backing up looks clunky. We are basically UNIX administrators trying to understand the foreign world of NT.
T.J. FISKE
Qualcomm Incorporated
tfiske@qualcomm.com
We are currently focusing on implementing SMS for our enterprise. We have about 3000 NT workstations and are looking for a way to easily manage those systems causing as little disruption to the end user as possible. Providing an easy way to distribute software to users who do not have Local Admin will be a great benefit.
Another area we are looking into is setting up highly available servers on NT. These would primarily be database and web servers. We are looking to WolfPack to provide that functionality.
We also are looking at creating tools to secure our environment. We have written a tool to open up the ability of the Power User group, so that the user does not require Administrator privileges on their machines. Several utilities are in the works to track who has administrator access on the local machines. Modification of the local administrator password, and auditing of that account.
GREG FLORKO
Systems Administrator
Fuji Capital Markets Corp.
2 World Trade Center, 80th floor
New York, NY 10048
phone: 212-898-2871
fax: 212-488-3177
gjf@fcmc.com
web: www.fcmc.com
I serve a dual role at Fuji Capital Markets supporting both the PC and UNIX platforms. Like many other organizations, we are migrating from the Windows 3.1 and 95 environment to NT 4.0 while maintaining our UNIX infrastructure.
My primary interests are in the area of security and file sharing in an environment consisting of both Windows NT and UNIX workstations. Specifically, I would like to learn how other organizations are addressing the issue of password changes being propagated to both environments simultaneously. I am also interested in learning what products are available for accessing UNIX NFS file systems and printers from Windows NT workstations.
BILL FORSYTH
Goldman Sachs and Co, New York
bill.forsyth@gs.com
https://smg08.fi.gs.com
Tel: 212-902-7233
FAX: 212-346-3729
Goldman Sachs is currently implementing a large scale NT rollout, with approximately 5000 stations currently deployed worldwide. Areas of interest include monitoring, remote control, software distribution, job scheduling, system administration tools, domain architecture, cloning/upgrading techniques, and merging filesystems and namespaces between UNIX and NT. My specific work has been in NT systems monitoring, and I would be happy to share my experiences if there is interest.
TIMOTHY GAASTRA
gaastra@cs.ucr.edu
gaastra@empirenet.com
I am an assistant systems administrator at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside. It is my responsibility to administer and deploy Windows NT and its associate applications to both the general student labs and the administrative staff of the Computer Science department and in some cases the College of Engineering as a whole. We began experimenting with NT 4.0 over a year ago and have had it deployed in the general labs for over 8 months and with the administrative staff for about 5 months.
At this point, NT serves primarily an educational and administrative role at our site. Research with that operating system is at a minimum and primarily consisting of porting previously existing applications and prototype drivers to it from Linux or another UNIX operating system. Our primary interests in the conference and NT as a whole currently are efforts to ease the system administration of NT as a whole and particularly to centralize it. We also are interested in end-user security, or methods to prevent the apparently inevitable corruption of an NT installation by many unauthorized users with aborted software installations and such. Finally, we are interested in providing as close of links with UNIX (and particularly Linux) as possible. Things such as file system drivers for Linux and shared authentication and protection models are of prime importance to us and tools like Samba and our own password synchronization unit are used extensively at our site.
RAYMOND GALLONI
INFOSEC Engineer
MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road
Bedford, MA 01730
(617)271-5267
fax: (617) 271-3816
rpgallon@mitre.org
Our sponsors are beginning to migrate their UNIX and NetWare based networks over to Windows NT. I am currently involved with a group that is trying to develop a security toolkit consisting of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products for these sponsors. Our efforts are just beginning and we are in the process of performing an in-depth evaluation of ISS SafeSuite, Kane Security Analyst, and similar tools. We are also looking at tools with more specific functions such as Event Log Analyzers, Access Control Analyzers, and Registry Analyzers. Overall, this toolkit must allow for a comprehensive analysis of network health, while not being too cumbersome to use.
Future goals will include developing a recommended security posture for implementation of NT Server and Workstation in a large-scale environment. This will embody recommended Registry settings, security profiles, group profiles, and the like. Meanwhile it must be adaptable to a different sponsor requirements.
Sponsorship includes several DOD agencies.
TODD I. GETCHELL
tigetche@paranet.com
Paranet, Inc.
9430 Research Blvd., Suite 400
Echelon IV
Austin, Texas 78759
Voice: (512)343-4526
Fax: (512)343-4516
The project I am currently working on at AMD in Austin involves the hardware and software upgrade of existing Windows 3.1 platforms to Windows 95 and Windows NT Workstation 4.0, and migration from UNIX based file and print services to NT Server 4.0. Thus far this has included:
-Setup and configuration of Windows NT Primary and Backup Domain controllers in a multi domain environment.
-Conversion of existing PC clients from PC-NFS to Microsoft networking.
-Providing user training in the transition from Win 3.1 program manager to Windows NT 4.0 desktop interface.
-Migration of existing UNIX based file shares to NT 4.0 servers.
-Disaster recovery planning and implementation.
I am working with UNIX Admins here at AMD to accomplish these goals. The biggest challenge we are facing now is keeping the objectives of our individual departments in line with those at the corporate level. Currently the company's strategy is a single corporate wide domain. I am hoping this workshop will be a good source of information regarding the administration of large NT networks and prepare me for the future of this organization.
XEV GITTLER
Lehman Brothers
101 Hudson Street, 38th Floor
Jersey City, NJ 07302
xev@lehman.com
Phone: (201) 524-4160
Fax: (201) 524-5828
My company has been rolling out NT for a few years now. At the end of this year we will have well over 5,000 systems worldwide. We are dealing with quite a few scale-related issues, including, but not limited to:
- How do we avoid machine visits?
- How do we tie into our UNIX namespace?
- How do we manage what is allowed installed, and what not (is the box a PC or a workstation)?
- How do we lower the number of SAs needed?
- How do we centralize management and monitoring
We are attempting to make the most of commercial solutions, but to date we are finding them sorely lacking, and therefore we are building a lot ourselves.
Coming from a UNIX background, specializing in managing very large numbers of systems, I realize the work that both Microsoft and third party vendors still need to do in order to address this market, and I hope that this conference will help shed some light on these issues.
MICHAIL GOMBERG
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 South Cass Ave
Argonne, IL 60439
gomberg@mcs.anl.gov
https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~gomberg
630-252-6175
I am a UNIX/NT networks/systems administrator at the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. We are a DOE research laboratory, primarily focused on scientific computation. We are also pursuing work in high-speed networking, collaboration tools and advanced visualization. Most of the work in our department has been primarily on UNIX workstations. However, in the past year we acquired a large number of Pentiums and are currently investigating whether it makes sense to run NT on these machines.
My primary projects as related to NT are:
- I am the primary architect and manager of a cluster on NT boxes on which we're investigating parallel computing possibilities as well as commodity-based supercomputing. I'm co-authoring a paper on this topic with Remy Evard (also of ANL).
- I'm investigating the issues of remote/scalable management of a large number of production NT workstations. The number of PC's running NT4.0 has increased significantly in our division. We're no longer capable of administering the machines by sitting at the console. I'm heavily involved designing and implementing the environment that will support a large number of NT users.
- There are several projects going on in the division that are porting or designing code for NT. I'm serving as an advisor for some of these groups since I have some experience with writing and running user code under NT.
BRAD GREER
Software Engineer
Networks and Distributed Computing, University of Washington
4545 25th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105
brad@cac.washington.edu
TELEPHONE: (206) 685-4179
FAX: (206) 685-4045
We currently use NT domain controllers for selected faculty/staff desktops and student laboratories. We are investigating the openness, UNIX interoperability, and scalability of NT as file servers, print servers, email servers, web servers, and media servers for 60,000+ users. Remote administration, security, integration with Kerberos 5, printing, and clustering of small NT servers are topics I am particularly interested in.
KATHY HAGEDON
Wright State University
khagedon@cs.wright.edu
8035 Parkeast Ct.
Centerville, Ohio 45458
937-434-9225
I just completed my first year of graduate school, working towards a Master's Degree in Computer Science. I will begin work on my thesis this fall and am currently researching operating systems and their performance as a possible topic. This summer I am working for Lexis-Nexis in the Capacity and Performance Management group. My responsibilities so far have been UNIX related, but we are adding more and more Windows NT servers. As our NT systems grow, I will be working more in that environment.
It is my intention to focus my thesis on a project here at Lexis-Nexis, related to UNIX and Windows NT system performance. We have numerous projects that make use of both types of systems. Within the UNIX environment, we are running SunOS, Solaris and HP operating systems. I would like to learn about compatibility issues between the various UNIX OSs and Windows NT. I am particularly interested in performance differences that others may have encountered between UNIX and Windows NT.
lewis@netserver.Stanford.EDU
STEVE HANSON
System Administrator
Honeywell Technology Center
MN65-3410
3660 Technology Dr.
Minneapolis, MN 55418
(612)951-7596
fax (612)951-7438
shanson@htc.honeywell.com
The Honeywell Technology center is an established UNIX site, having approximately 200 UNIX systems, mostly Sun. Recently there has been a serious culture shock within the organization, as large numbers of NT systems are being put in. Unfortunately, very little thought had been given to how these machines are going to be administered, since the users and management had felt that these were after all PC's and wouldn't have the high administration costs they believe are necessary for UNIX machines. So far experience seems to be showing that the cost of ownership for the NT boxes appears to be higher than for the UNIX machines, and that many of the models of administration we have for UNIX systems don't work very well in the NT environment.
One of the end results has been that many users are using the new NT systems on their desks as badly implemented X terminals to display applications that they are actually running on UNIX systems. Simultaneously, many of our management are congratulating themselves on how they have been saving money by making the transition to cheaper PC systems - apparently they haven't looked at this years computing budget, which has grown considerably to support the mix of systems. The addition of NT boxes to the network in large numbers has raised a number of difficult interoperability issues, for most of which we have found no solutions.
STEVEN HEARN
Manager Systems Management
Infrastructure Development
Westpac Banking Corporation
Level 4, 72 Christie Street
St. Leonards Sydney NSW 2065
hearns@ozemail.com.au
The following paragraphs outline the Large Scale NT Operations Management disciplines that we are addressing today. We are managing in excess of 1000 NT Servers, and the number is likely to grow. UNIX systems are also on the increase and are starting to participate in the NT environment.
In Progress
* Help Desk processes and tools to support our branches.
* Centralized NT alerting for critical operating system events and business alarms.
* Management reporting of historical alerts to assist with follow-up tasks.
* Software and data distribution capability to all branches.
* Change Management and Lodgment of PC applications into existing host based systems.
* Education on the Help Desk to assist with the acceptance of new Systems Management needs and processes.
The organization has also successfully deployed a large scale diskless remote boot workstation platform. This is helping to reduce distributed Systems Management overheads. Management of the critical servers is paramount, whilst the remote boot scenario helps to reduce daily workstation administration.
Planned Activities
There are several disciplines or requirements within the realm of distributed Systems Management that will be addressed. These include:
* Proactive capacity and performance management.
* Enhanced virus management.
* Local NT automation.
* Application management.
* Enterprise integration.
* Intranet.
* Updated Systems Management strategy and business alignment.
STEVE HILLMAN
hillman@sfu.ca
Systems Consultant
604-291-3960
Academic Computing Services
Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University is a mid-sized university with roughly 15000 full-time students and 5000 computers around campus. About half of those computers are PCs. Most computing resources are provided by Academic Computing Services, where I work as a Systems Administrator. We provide centrally administered computing accounts, file & print services, e-mail, and in most cases, web services. Virtually all services are a mix of UNIX and NetWare, however we have recently upgraded our public labs to Pentium-based PCs running NT Workstation and integration has become an issue.
Our goal is to integrate NT as smoothly as possible into our existing infrastructure, rather than restructure everything to accommodate NT. A student should be able to sit down at any public workstation, login with their assigned ID, and access their e-mail, UNIX (via Samba?) or NetWare filespace, and appropriate printers. A student should also be able to login in from a professor's NT-equipped machine without messing with the environment or leaving the machine in an unfriendly state afterwards.
So far, this is proving challenging!
JOHN HOLMWOOD
Infrastructure Architect
NOVA Gas Transmission Ltd.
PO Box 2535 Station M
Calgary, AB Canada
T2P 2N6
Phone 403 261 8349
Fax 403 261 8333
john.holmwood@pipe.nova.ca
Our organization is just starting the deployment phase of a project to replace 3500 Windows 3.1 based workstations with Windows NT 4. Follow on phases of the program include replacing a mainframe based email system with Microsoft Exchange and replacing Novell servers in 17 branch offices with Windows NT server. In the initial replacement the file services will be replaced by NT file services. The print services will be replaced by Dazel. Subsequently we intend to replace the NT file services with DFS. This change should coincide with the deployment of Windows NT 5 in 1999.
At the same time we are deploying DCE on our 100 UNIX servers including IBM OS/390, AIX, HP-UX and Digital UNIX. We are also deploying Tivoli systems management framework products to manage the entire environment.
The program is slightly unusual in that we are taking a holistic approach to the entire computing infrastructure from the desktop to the enterprise class servers and attempting to provide a consistent environment for all of our applications while maintaining commercial environments that off the shelf applications can fully utilize.
JEFFREY J. HOOVER
Cisco Systems, Inc.
jjh@cisco.com
170 West Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134-1706
(408) 526-5157 (voice)
(408) 526-4575 (fax)
<https://www.cisco.com>
Here at Cisco we have a somewhat complex Multiple Master Domain environment. We have 4 Master Domains based on Global Location and Function (Engineering/Corporate). The Domains are further broken into Business Unit and location. We are considering a move to Exchange servers and have some concerns about UNIX - Exchange interoperability. Another concern in the UNIX - WinNT arena is Document/Revision control and the ability to share files via NFS systems.
My personal background covers Macintosh, UNIX (SunOS, UCB & Solaris), and Microsoft Windows administration in an Engineering environment. I am a native of the Silicon Valley (I predate many of the buildings and miss the orchards.)
JAMES W. HOWELL
Cornell Information Technologies
Network & Computing Systems
Home Page: <https://lmbass.cit.cornell.edu/>
Phone: (607)-255-9369
jwh2@cornell.edu
My name is James W. Howell, a Systems Programmer at Cornell University located at 315 CCC, Ithaca, NY 14853, email: jwh2@cornell.edu, phone: 607-255-9369, fax: 607-255-6523. The campus is largely using NT for file sharing and small servers to date. However we will be faced with installing, running, maintaining a large number of NT servers to run Peoplesoft Middleware as the campus migrates from running it's business from a IBM mainframe environment to NT/UNIX client server. We need to come up with ways to do this very very well. Other NT servers will be used for some other miscellaneous services, we need to get better at dealing with NT, and establish some contacts.. Jim
BEN HUNG
GTE Laboratories, Inc.
40 Sylvan Road
Waltham, MA 02254
bh03@gte.com
617-466-2260(Voice)
617-466-3339(Fax)
I am a system administrator on GTE Labs, I am setup window NT for our Labs, I am working on setup Microsoft exchange, sms server, mail server, SQL server, to work with our "tonics" application. I would like to know " How to read NT's core dump file ", " How to make NT workstation more stable, when we use our application on NT."
TIM IRVIN
Cisco Systems, Inc.
170 W. Tasman Dr
San Jose CA 95134
irvin@cisco.com
There is a current push corporate-wide to move the non-engineering community to NT workstations. This includes using Microsoft Exchange for corporate e-mail and scheduling. I am the Postmaster at Cisco, and having dealt very little with NT in the past -- need to understand how this change will effect our internal e-mail delivery systems.
WARREN JESSOP
Box 352350
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
Phone 206-685-3797
FAX 206-543-2969
whj@cs.washington.edu
Mainly involved with UNIX system/network administration now, but NT boxes are multiplying exponentially here, and UNIX will soon be relegated to back rooms, if it survives at all.
I'm interested in how UNIX experience can help in administering NT, e.g. automating installation and day to day administration. I realize Microsoft has "their" way, e.g. SMS, but what can be done (has been done) if the Microsoft way doesn't work for your setup.
I've done some setup and configuration of NT, and have completed two courses (NT 4.0 Admin & Core Technologies and NT 4.0 Enterprise & MS TCP/IP) so am not altogether a novice.
KENT JOHNSON
Sr. Systems Programmer
CIS/VCC
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 Eighth Street
Troy NY 12180-
Phone: (528) 276 - 8175
Fax: (518) 276 - 2809
johnsk6@rpi.edu
We currently provide most of our computing services from UNIX systems. We use AFS as our central filesystem and authentication database and are planning to migrate to DCE/DFS. We expect to integrate these products into our Windows-NT servers.
We are evaluating Windows-NT solutions for many of our existing services. We are evaluating Mail, News and WWW servers on Windows-NT. We also intend to include Windows-NT compute servers into our existing UNIX-based NIC cluster. We are planning to port DQS to Windows-NT as the queuing system, support scientific calculation packages such as NAG and Maple on Windows-NT, and support MPI for parallel computating on Windows-NT.
MICHAEL B. JONES
Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way, Building 9s/1076
Redmond, WA 98052, USA
mbj@microsoft.com
https://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/
I have built a number of research systems using Windows NT over the past five years. I worked on the Tiger video fileserver, which runs on Windows NT, and was deployed as part of Microsoft's Interactive TV trials. My work on the Rialto real-time operating system used Windows NT as its development environment. I am currently investigating the real-time performance characteristics of Windows NT.
YONAH KARP
(206) 543-2876
yonah@u.washington.edu
Manager, University Computing Services
University of Washington
4545 15th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98105-4527
At the University of Washington central computing, we are used to creating clusters which serve 5000 to 50,000 users by using an association of UNIX workstations, our own clustering software, and a variety of other locally written and publicly available tools. Currently, we serve 60,000 campus users email and information services, as well as more specialized services like statistical and research applications, with our UNIX clusters.
We are looking at the potential of NT in our environment and will be piloting a project in the near future to look at the feasibility of serving a large segment of our population through NT-based clustering on Intel hardware.
ROGER B.A. KLORESE
rogerk@veritas.com
While VERITAS has begin the process of migrating its PC-network services (including Exchange for mail) to NT, my principal interest is as a provider of software in the NT and UNIX markets. In addition to selling our own high-availability and backup products, we are porting our disk management software to NT, where a subset of it will be included as a standard component of the next release. I am interested to hear how people are using and planning to use NT servers, and understanding how issues of server storage management will differ for NT administrators.
DAN C. KOSITCH
Manufacturing Tech. Support bld. #4
8110 SE 34th Street
PO Box 8906
Camas, Washington 98607
kositch@hp-vcd.vcd.hp.com
(360) 212-3138
Fax # (360) 212-4242
We are primary a UNIX Production Server and UNIX Line Controller production application shop. With a few Novell Servers and UNIX Database Servers mix in. We have few Industrial PC's scattered around the production floor supported by Novell Servers and UNIX database servers. Our production Software applications are UNIX base and Win16 base that run on Industrial PC's under Microsoft Windows System. We have started replacing our Novell Servers with Microsoft Windows NT Server Systems. We decided to migrate our Win16 Applications to Win32 Applications. Along with this we are migrating towards OLE Servers and more use of Visual Basic from Microsoft. This has placed more demand for Windows NT Servers and Loading Windows NT operating systems on our industrial PC's. Most all of our Software Application are heavily LAN based using our own TCP/IP base CIM Sockets for Communication. With this we will be changing to ClearCase for Software Revision Control. Also, we will be centralizing our PLC State and Latter Code Software Servers. We use a lot NFS Mounting for backup production Servers which speed up network communication and allows us to Ninstall to our production servers if one of them gets it's data or application corrupted to restore the computer to proper running order. While we are rolling out new production lines alone with working to accomplish our migration goals and retrofit existing lines to meet our migration goals. This must take place with minimum production disruption and keeping our LAN Structure intact.
So we need to develop our Windows NT expertise to accomplish these goals stated above. Especially get into Windows NT System operating System inter- action with network, so we can integrate it into our LAN Structure. We also need to have better understanding of application development done on Windows NT and more about that process. With this we need to know Windows NT version development path so our migration plans do not run into a dead end. We will also explore better ways to integrate our Windows NT Servers with our UNIX Database Servers. we are also interested in Windows NT operating System Real Time response and ways of influencing it.
Our general focus is on providing production Software applications and support for the same on mixed set of controllers and servers. This can range from UNIX database and application servers, UNIX production line controllers, Novell servers, some NT Servers communicating across LAN to Industrial Windows PC and X-terminals. We are migrating towards Win32 Application Windows NT PC's. We are also concerned about fitting the New Windows NT PC's into are mixed Network setup. Most of are present Software applications are network based. So, fitting NT Windows Operating System into this is also a concern.
We will also be centralizing our PLC State and Latter Code Software Servers. We will be migrating towards OLE Server and Visual Basic code development Servers. With this we will be changing to ClearCase for Software Revision Control. We use a lot NFS Mounting for backup production Servers which speed up network communication and allows us to Ninstall to our production servers if one of the computers gets their data or application corrupted to restore them to proper running order.
PAUL KRANENBURG
Erasmus University
Rotterdam, NL
At the Erasmus University we are preparing for a large scale introduction of Windows NT on desktop systems (i386 architecture). A top priority issue is the accommodation of a wide variety of required functionality (and accompanying user skill levels), ranging from simple administrative tasks to the full flexibility typically expected on research stations. The first batch of desktop systems on which Windows NT will be deployed numbers around 600 stations.
Additionally, a couple of educational labs - for a total of 200 stations - open to students will be running NT shortly. This environment will be integrated closely enough as to allow teachers preparing classes to use any workstation while retaining access to -- and consistent views of -- the resources available in the labs.
Central in this effort is the deployment of a uniform installation and operations model. This model must ensure basic connectivity to both "tightly coupled" LAN services and a more loosely defined (and typically far more diverse) set of information services maintained by other departments. Also, the model should facilitate the lightest possible load on helpdesk personnel, by automating installations of commonly used applications and providing strict guide-lines for installing not-so-common applications, in conjunction with applying appropriate file protection measures.
STEVE LAMMERT
Steve_Lammert@transarc.com
Member of Technical Staff
Transarc Corp
Gulf Tower
Pittsburgh PA 15219
Voice: +1-412-338-4443
FAX: +1-412-338-4404
The computing environment in the early years of our company was completely UNIX-based. Back then, the unifying principle of workstation administration was our own AFS distributed file system and its Kerberos-based authentication method, which gave us "single sign-on", single-point user administration, file system security, and easier workstation administration (e.g. exclusively "dataless" workstation).
In the past three years, the Windows presence here has grown from a few isolated porting groups and rapid-prototyping efforts into a major new platform for development, delivery, and customer support. While we have had some success integrating NT into the existing environment (e.g. building products from a single source tree on both NT and UNIX, using our AFS NT client), other aspects of our internal PC growth has not been as well-planned.
I am new to the NT world, both as a user and an administrator, and have great interest in how existing large sites deal with: NT user administration, especially single sign-on in a heterogeneous environment; workstation administration, especially remote and/or network installation of operating systems and applications; help desk issues, e.g. remote debugging of user problems; and backup. In other words, I expect to be doing more listening than talking.
LARS H LARSSON
Senior Research Eng.
EHS/GS System Laboratory
Ericsson Hewlett-Packard Telecommunications AB
PO Box 333, S-431 24 MOLNDAL, Sweden,
Phone: +46-31-7462141
Fax: +46-31-7462406
ehslhl@aom.ericsson.se
EHPT is a joint venture between Ericsson and Hewlett-Packard developing telecom management systems. The goal of the system laboratory is to increase the knowledge of new technologies in the EHPT community and define how new technologies can be used. We do this by
* doing evaluations and prototyping with new technology
* supporting other units with technology expertise
* analysing competitors products from a technical point of view
Traditionally EHPT is a UNIX shop but demands for Windows NT are coming more and more. We are thus actively investigating the use of NT as a standard platform, both on the client and server side.
Most of our projects for the moment concern the development of distributed and "componentized" applications running in heterogeneous environments. Currently we are concentrating on CORBA-based solutions but we are also looking into other distribution mechanisms. Other areas of concern are security, transaction handling, WWW interfaces, software distribution, etc.
JERRY LAU
jlec@dcs.ed.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science
The University of Edinburgh
Room 3316, James Clerk Maxwell Building
King's Buildings, Mayfield Road,
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ
Phone (Office) : (44) 131 6507151
Phone (Home) : (44) 131 6676000 Ext 45001
I am currently a MSc student in the University of Edinburgh taking Computer Science. My area of interest includes the following: networking (hardware, system administration and management, ATM, ISDN), graphics, mechanical engineering (CIM, robotics), multiprocessors hardware & software and distributed system. I hope to apply all or most of my above interests and knowledge in areas that requires cross discipline applications.
Presently, I am doing my research in the Abstract Virtual Environment Simulator. This is an Artificial Intelligence faculty-linked project which involves visualization of the workspace of a robotic arm in 3D using OpenGL under SGI Irix or SUN Solaris. I intend to port it over to NT once my project is completed. I am also looking into linking SUN Solaris/SGI Irix with NT in terms of data passing.
I believe the workshop would help me tremendously to gain knowledge in the following areas using NT which I intend to work on: large scale databases and real-time multithreading processes in CIM, multimedia in NT using ISDN or ATM, expansion of multiprocessor processing on NT with a few servers and improvement in management of NT through visualization and graphical representation.
MICHAEL LAVELLE
lavelle@cig.mot.com
IS Project Leader
Rm 2231
1501 W. Shuer Drive
Arlington Heights, Il 60004
P: 847.632.7359
F: 847.632.4552
Issues that I hope to gain further insight into, with a hope of solving existing problems within a Very Large UNIX-centered environment, into which NT systems are "add-on" servers are:
Single Login
This is a single user name and password. Wherever the password is changed, this change is automatically and quickly propagated to all systems, whether they are UNIX or Microsoft. This MUST apply to all vendor implementations of UNIX, including SGI & Linux. Last time I looked, TransArc's Kerberos implementation did not address either.
File IDs and file system exports
The identity of the user who owns or is allowed access to files or other filesystem objects within a system must be one-to-one mappable between systems, if the IDs are not identical.
Provision of a specific single application from an NT server to an arbitrary X capable display without foisting the entire "desktop" upon the display as well.
RealTime LoadBalancing (as well as batch/queuing) must be available for these X capable applications to be provided to any X capable display.
Printing and Mail services are currently provided for to the NT base through my UNIX environment, but I'd like to see how effectively the NT environment can provide for the UNIX environment.
The main research topics I'm pursuing are:
* Providing single applications without the desktop environment to an X-based display, whatever this may be.
* Strength/weakness of alternatives in eliminating the "drive centric" filesystem layout of native Microsoft OS's into a tree-structured AFS/NFS/UNIX representation.
* Integration of voice recognition interfaces into an application.
* Providing LoadBalanced anonymous Compute and Interactive Application Servers to a heterogeneous, embedded control software development community.
* Routing behaviour in a large campus environment with multiple interfaces in a single machine, and multiple machines with single interfaces masquerading under the same name. What limitations do WINS present in this environment? How does DNS really work with a WINS environment?
ROLAND KWOK CHEUNG LAW
roland@ns2.polynesia.com
Polynesian Cultural Center
55-370 Kamehameha Highway, Laie, HI 96762
Phone: (808) 293-3163
I am an undergraduate student of Brigham Young University - Hawaii, and I am also working part-time at the Polynesian Cultural Center as a network administrator. We are using Windows NT as our major network operating system, and we have an IBM RS6000 machine running Universe database for the business transactions. Since we are implementing Data Warehouse, which will retrieve the data in the RS6000 and analyst in the Windows NT box, I need to understand some administrative skills that combinative structure. Also, we are in the transition of replacing all our Apple Macintosh machines with PCs. Therefore, we are looking for better administrative strategies to implement and maintain these PCs. In the mean time, we still have many Mac machines to be administrated. Therefore, I hope the knowledge that I will learn from this event can help me to plan a better administrative strategy for our networking environment.
JEFF LEWIS
lewis@stanford.edu
(415) 723-7786
Distributed Computing Group, Stanford University
fax: (415) 725-9121
3rd floor, Sweet Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-3090
I work with the central computer support organization for Stanford, supporting primarily the academic computing needs of the Stanford community. We have many academic, research and administrative departments committing to the Windows NT platform and as one of the professionals charged with both supporting them and helping them to evaluate their options, I'd like to learn more about the capabilities and limitations of NT as a user and server platform. I'm hoping that this conference and the previous NT Workshop conference will give me more of the background I need to help them out.
We aren't currently doing much more with NT than running it on some of our workstations, but my primary interest is in learning about and evaluating NT as a server platform for databases and world-wide-web information.
GABRIEL C. LOPEZ-WALLE
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 N. Matthews Av.
Urbana, IL 61801
ph. (217) 398-9403
fax. (217) 244-8371
gabriel@acm.org
Here in the University of Illinois I am responsible of only 10 personal computers, most of them using Windows 95 but in a very near future, in about 2 months, I am going to upgrade all of them to Windows NT and because I am also responsible of about 90 UNIX workstations I know that is a good idea to start with the right foot in terms of planning. I am pretty sure we will have more PCs and I know that making a very good plan since the beginning can help me to avoid many problems in the future. That is why I would like to assist to this Windows NT Workshop.
CHRIS MATTINGLY
Systems Programmer
NC State University
200 Page Hall - Box 7901
Raleigh, NC 27695-7901
Voice: (919) 515-3318
Fax: (919) 515-7463
camattin@eos.ncsu.edu
- Trying to integrate NT with an existing installation of 1500 UNIX workstation
Current environment consists of Sun workstations, DEC Alphas, HPs, RS/6000s, all sharing AFS filespace.
- Implement Kerberos security
Implement a name/directory service (Hesiod, BIND, LDAP, NDS)
KClient callbacks to kerberized applications (printing, pop)
- Implement network filesystems for migrant user population
Home file space should follow the users wherever they login
User profile should follow the user, along with their registry settings
- Migrate users off of existing Novell networks
- Automate NT installations via network install with ability to customize the resulting installation.
JOHN MAUL
mauljohn@erols.com
The Aerospace Corporation
My interest is in the migration of a large Network (say 8,000 workstations) from UNIX to NT. The present network uses DEC UNIX servers to provide services to a mixture of PC, Mac, and NeXT Workstations. The majority of services offered by the DEC UNIX Servers are NeXT services. The NeXT workstations are mostly 166 MHz Pentiums. The future network will have a majority of workstations running NT on these same Pentium workstations.
The servers during the migration will either be UNIX servers running NT services or NT servers running UNIX services.
The questions I would like answered include:
1) What NT services to be run on DEC UNIX Servers are available?
2) What UNIX services to be run on NT Servers are available?
3) What is the direction for NT 5.0?
3a) Will Trust relationships still be used in NT 5.0?
3b) Will Web-based addressing be used in NT 5.0?
Mr. X provides systems administration support for the engineering organization within Manugistics, a leading developer of supply chain management software. He is responsible for identifying hardware, software, and networking needs, implementing solutions, and troubleshooting problems. The development environment includes Windows NT, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris servers and several hundred client workstations. The development team is located in six geographic locations.
MICHAEL MCCOLLUM
Lead Systems Administrator
Manugistics, Inc.
2115 E. Jefferson St.
Rockville, MD 20852
301-255-8111
mmccollu@manu.com
Mr. McCollum has over 10 years experience with various versions of the UNIX operating system and over 6 years of experience with the Oracle RDBMS. He is an Oracle Certified DBA and is near completion of his MCSE. >
SCOTT MCCOY
UC Santa Cruz
stmc@cats.ucsc.edu
The University of California Santa Cruz is evaluating Windows-NT as a platform for providing file space to students, faculty and staff. UCSC has a strong UNIX infrastructure at present that must be integrated with any new OS that might be centrally supported. Our evaluation to date has been less than satisfactory. Our primary concerns are:
Scalability (flat-file name/machine space)
Bandwidth usage (too much broadcasting)
Open (it's not)
Cost (how much do we have to buy to have a workable NT-WAN structure?)
JARL W. MCDONALD
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc.
550 Kirkland Way, ste 264
Kirkland, WA 98033
Phone: (425) 739-2061
URL: www.sequent.com
jarl@sequent.com
Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. manufactures and delivers large scale, multiprocessor computer systems that address the needs of large data centers. There are two areas of relevant focus:
NT on cc-NUMA
The Sequent Symmetry product line has been based upon a Symmetrical Multi-Processor (SMP) architecture (2-32 processors) leveraging commodity components (e.g., Intel Pentium CPUs). These systems were delivered with a Sequent-developed scaleable UNIX, DYNIX/ptx.
Last year, Sequent introduced a new product line called the NUMA-Q 2000. In contrast to a large bus SMP architecture, the NUMA-Q 2000 is a scaleable hardware product based upon a Pentium Pro cache-coherent Non Uniform Memory Architecture (cc-NUMA) using a 4-processor building block. Dynix/ptx was modified and enhanced to efficiently support the NUMA-Q 2000 architecture. NT scalability and performance is being investigated with respect to cc-NUMA architectures. Of particular concern are issues of I/O distribution and scheduling, memory management, and processor allocation.
Mixed NT and UNIX (DYNIX/ptx)
Heterogeneous environments raise issues of system management, resource sharing, and system control. The range of tools and products in both environments is constantly growing which creates a challenge in delivering customer oriented management and control capabilities. Relevant issues in such an environment include: the integration of UNIX and NT, file sharing, fault tolerance, application services, user administration, serviceability, security, and reliability.
LYLE D. MEIER
Texaco INC
P.O. Box 430
Bellaire, Tx 77402
713 432 3174
meierld@texaco.com
Texaco has been migrating from an environment with 14 email systems and 3 network operating systems to an environment with Microsoft Exchange and Windows NT as the network operating system. We have been engaged in this work since the 3.5 time frame, and have developed a modified domain model. In addition we have uncovered some of the problems in making NT work in an world wide fashion with one account everywhere.
In addition we are deploying NT workstation in several locations on our desktops. We have currently over 400 servers, and have mostly completed the migrations. We are concerned about a uniform infrastructure that includes telecommunications challenged Parts of the world as well as areas that are well endowed with good telecommunications.
PRAVEEN MOGILI
Associate In Computer Applications
College Of Engineering, University of South Florida
4202 E Fowler Ave., ENB 118, Tampa FL 33620.
Phone : 813-974-4106
Fax : 813-974-4464
e-mail : mogili@eng.usf.edu
URL : https://io.eng.usf.edu
We are currently using NT based systems primarily as file servers with a plan to implement other services like printing, web and databases. Our research is primarily focused on integrating the NT systems in to our existing UNIX based software systems. Some of the projects include:
1) Developing a Global Authentication System (logins)
2) Integrating UNIX and Windows NT Printing (accounting, quota)
3) Porting
a) UNIX system administration scripts
b) UNIX database applications
4) Distributed Applications (CORBA, DCOM, Java, ActiveX)
ARCH MOTT
arch@cisco.com
Cisco Systems, Inc.
170 West Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
Voice:(408)526-4485
FAX:(408)526-4575
As is the case with many other businesses that used to have engineering departments dominated by UNIX computing, Cisco systems is faced with a burgeoning NT user community, seemingly driven mostly by management, rather than technical, direction. Issues we need to address include sharing resources to avoid duplication, centralizing user administration and allowing centralized administration and monitoring of system and network security.
MIKE MURPHY
Phone: (619)-537-3218 Fax:(619)-695-9501
Mike Murphy <mmurphy@hdssd.hitachi.com>
I currently use UNIX and NT workstations to teach installation and configuration of Hitachi RAID devices connected via SCSI interfaces. Classically, I have always used UNIX stations and now delving into the NT world with a heterogeneous network connecting them all together.
The areas I would like to pursue would be in the area of setting up homogeneous user account domains that would work across all the platforms if that is feasible (NIS type). Also, being able to use some form of the mount command (both locally and remotely) if it exists on NT in order to administer and control these large RAID devices for failover and filesharing.
If anyone has had success along these lines I would like to chat about it.
RODNEY NELSON
Hewlett - Packard
Vancouver Div.
rodney_nelson@hp.com
The information that would be most useful will be managing NT in a large-scale network executing automated stations unattended. We are in the processes of porting a UNIX environment to NT for our LAN test and data collection applications. NT appears to be an attractive platform for data dissimulation to management personnel for real time information. There are some issues with porting UNIX to NT that need to be clarified. Also, security and viruses are concerns associated with this migration.
I understand that most of the NT environment is already in place and I am very interested in NT 5. I have the understanding that there are significant changes to sections of the operating system.
STEVE NELSON
nelson@bv.com
(913)458-2445
Unix Sys Admin
Black & Veatch
11401 Lamar
Overland Park, KS 66211
I am not in the process of directly doing anything with NT, and hope not to be put into that untenable position in the foreseeable future. My attendance at this conference is more along the lines of learning what NT can do to our systems and networks and how to prevent any problems that it may cause.
Our company is in the process of 'standardizing' on pc's. During the process we have found that there is no such thing as a 'standard' pc. Therefore, we are trying to figure out the best methods to allow for all the variants and incorporate them into our existing server/network structure. In addition, we are trying to find/develop support tools to minimize desktop administration headaches.
I have promised the local zealots to be open-minded and will try to extract un-biased, useful information.
BRYAN NEWCASTLE
Whirlpool Corporation
303 Upton Drive M/D 0204
Attn: Bryan Newcastle
St. Joseph, MI 49085
Bryan_J_Newcastle@email.whirlpool.com
Phone: (616) 923-6073
Fax: (616) 923-6117
At my site, I am attempting to make my customers' lives easier by providing an integrated CAD/email/electronic tools environment. Right now, the CAD is all done on a UNIX workstation using Pro/Engineer, with all of the other tasks like email and MS-Word/Excel/PowerPoint done on a PC. The current focus is to move all of this functionality onto one box in order to free up desk space, and more importantly, reduce the number of machines that must be purchased.
We have looked at both using an NT product via X-windows or other forms on the UNIX workstation, and also changing to only use PCs, as they are Initially more cost-effective. Issues for the NT side of things are integration issues and software distribution issues (as the NT stations do not have to stay on at all times).
CAMERON NINHAM
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
University of Illinois
152 Computing Applications Building
605 E. Springfield Avenue
Champaign
IL 61820, USA
cninham@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Tel: (217) 265-0384
Fax: (217) 244-1987
I am a senior System Engineer for NCSA, working on NT/UNIX interoperability, enterprise management, software development (including database and OpenGL graphics), and NT Server administration. I have a strong interest in NT clustering, large database application development and deployment, and graphics visualization (in order of preference).
LINUS NORDBERG
Incolumitas AB
linus@incolumitas.se
Incolumitas AB | Phone: +46-8-656 24 40
Warfvinges v=E4g 16 | GSM: +46-706-75 74 72
S-112 51 STOCKHOLM, Sweden | PGP Bits/KeyID: 1024/F854DAB9
PGP fingerprint: 6A CC 4A 59 7A 49 D5 02 38 35 43 09 5F C0 84 F7
Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Incolumitas is a company specialized in information security. Our main business is security reviewing including code inspection, analysis of weaknesses in network layout and verification of consistency between policy and implementation.
Cooperation between different types of computer systems brings us into networking and networking security. In the specific area of cooperation between UNIX and Windows NT systems we are testing and evaluating as many as possible of the available products, mainly from a security perspective.
MARK O'CONNELL
Data General Corporation
62 TW Alexander Drive
RTP, NC 27709
oconnell@dg-rtp.dg.com
(919) 248-6150
Data General wishes to use Windows NT to address the problems of the large scale, enterprise marketplace. We are particularly interested in high availability features of Windows NT, scaling of commercial workloads (especially database and data mining workloads), and new and emerging I/O architectures, such as i2o. Clustering will likely have a large impact on many of these areas and will be a technology which we wish to actively explore.
BERNIE O'CONNOR
Company: SAS Institute, Inc.
snoblo@wnt.sas.com
Phone: 919.677.8000
Our group's current focus is integrating Microsoft Exchange Server into our corporate mail network. Several areas that we are implementing/investigating solutions are:
. Daily updates of Exchange directory with our corporate information
* Off hours remote support
* System monitoring
* Performance monitoring
* Messaging security
* Browser access to mail
* Elm folder conversion to outlook folders
* Meeting/resource scheduling
* Email virus protection
MARK PAGE
See Becky Dowell
JUSTIN PIETSCH
Networks and Distributed Computing, University of Washington
4545 15th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98105
(206) 685-6234
pietsch@cac.washington.edu
We are integrating NT and UNIX to provide support for about 350 PCs and 1200 X-terminals as well as using NT servers to service streaming video. Integrating our environment even better is always a concern, especially authentication and authorization. Also, we have the concern of integrating our environment with the whole University which includes over 60,000 accounts. Another concern is managing a large amount of NT servers/workstations remotely, simply, cheaply and as easily as possible.
RON PRESS
rpress@ist.UWaterloo.ca
University of Waterloo
Information Systems and Technology
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada N2L 3G1
Position: Manager, PC & Mac Support
Site Profile: 35 NT Servers 2600 PCs 800 Macs 600 UNIX
My primary task using NT today is for the support of the administrative areas.
This consists of approximately 20 servers running
Windows NT Server and 850 workstations running Windows95. Windows NT Workstation is starting to be used in several areas as well. The support for student computing is being looked at. We do have a training lab of 20 PCs and 12 Macs. Have written scripts to build accounts and setup courses. There is also at least one lab setup for student use in one faculty.
Areas of concern we have currently are:
Our domain model being used. Currently multiple master. We are quickly needing inter-domain connections for Oracle etc.
Workstation support. We are currently deploying NetCon for this.
Student computing support. Issues include management and security.
DANIEL PUM
bongo@mtu.edu
Michigan Technological University
Civil & Env Engineering
1400 Townsend Drive
Houghton, MI 49931
Phone: 906/487-3493
Fax: 906/487-3409
I work primarily with integrating NT and UNIX. We have a mix of NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 workstation on the desktop, a mix of NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 servers, and Sun servers running Solaris 2.x. My major focus is with integrating the mix of NT and UNIX, such as file sharing, printer sharing and login authentication. I also work with setting up new systems, so I am interested in SMS. For file sharing, we use samba. For printer sharing, we use the NT servers which lpr to the UNIX servers. For authentication, we currently maintain two password lists, but would like to move to a single system for ease of maintenance.
IAN REDDY
Simon Fraser University, Academic Computing Services
Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6
ian@sfu.ca
604-291-3936
604-291-4242
SFU currently operates the majority of its campus-wide server infrastructure using UNIX and Novell based technology. Windows NT is now being evaluated for its potential as a production quality server platform on which to deploy, initially, emerging server applications such as dynamic web and multimedia (i.e. video, multicasting) services and, eventually, boiler plate services such as file, print, web, news, and e-mail services. In some cases the cause for evaluation has been reduced cost, in others the cause has been the lack of appropriate solutions in the UNIX or Novell arenas.
Academic Computing Services at SFU has also recently deployed a couple of hundred NT workstations in its student labs and is looking for ways to effectively manage these workstations. At the same time we hope to increase the productivity and services that these workstations deliver to campus users. All of this must be accomplished in a secure and reliable manner, where "secure" includes the risks that these workstations present both to and from the Internet.
Our problems include the difficulty of enabling ubiquitous access by which to remotely manage NT servers, securing NT workstations, and updating large numbers of NT workstations with patches and hot fixes. A bonus of deploying NT versus, say, Windows 95 has been opportunities for the greater integration of our traditional UNIX and Novell environments with the Microsoft Windows paradigm.
JAMES M. ROBERTS
Manager Computing Facilities
Computer Science Department
Princeton University,
jmr@cs.princeton.edu,
phone (609) 258 1750,
fax (609) 258 1771
We have a large heterogeneous environment supporting both research and education, composed of several hundred PCs running NT and workstations running various flavors of UNIX. One immediate goal is to automate the installation and ongoing maintenance of the NT workstations. We have to some degree a simple integrated environment (disk space, printing) using samba, but we hope to expand the integration, especially with regard to common, secure passwords and file protections across different environments. Eventually, we will want to combine SMS type information with our current inventory system written in perl.
JIM ROBINSON
Sequent Customer Support; Microsoft NT jimr@sequent.com
I currently work in the American Operations Customer Service Center for Sequent Computer Systems, Inc, maker and reseller of high end and mid range UNIX and NT Open System servers. I handle customer calls that range from NT OS questions to hardware problems on four different hardware platforms. I deal more on the hardware level and have only 1.5 years of NT experience. Prior to working at Sequent, I gained a year of experience with SCO UNIX. The past eight years have been spent working with different hardware.
MATTHEW ROGOYSKI
Orchard Mesa Research Center
Colorado State
University
3168 B .5 Road
Grand Junction, CO 80503
rogoyski@lamar.colostate.edu
970-434-3264 (voice)
970-434-1035 (fax)
I have been a member of the USENIX Association since late eighties and participated in numerous USENIX meetings.
My work with the Windows NT platform is in the area of scientific applications and integration of scientific and administrative tasks. I need to access applicability of NT for applications such as analysis of large data sets found in remote sensing research, image processing, geographical information systems, simulations, and spatial statistics.
Windows NT is already being used for some research and administrative tasks at our facility. The need exists to integrate these tasks and develop a distributed system. In near future three of our research centers are being administratively combined - this presents an opportunity to introduce platform such as Windows NT throughout this new geographically distributed regional center.
RANDY ROSE
drose@cisco.com
We are trying to implement NT into an existing very large UNIX base. We are using UNIX for DNS, e-mail and internet. We have implemented DHCP successfully across both platforms. We have successfully managed to roll out NT images over the network. We are having difficulty in finding a back-up solution that takes into account remote sites and home users. We are considering the implementation of Exchange Server for meeting scheduling functionality.
LETCHER ROSS
letcher@cac.washington.edu
System Projects Manager
Networks and Distributed Computing
University of Washington
4545 25th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105
Phone: (206) 685-4126
Fax: (206) 685-4045
NT is becoming more and more important to the projects I manage and the future of our clustered UNIX servers. I hope to be able to learn more about how to integrate NT with our UNIX systems and make good decisions as to when to best use each operating system.
ANNE SALEMME
TransarcCorporation
P.O. Box 1354, Fort Point Station
Boston, MA 02205
phone: 617-357-9089
anne@transarc.com
I have been doing UNIX systems administration work since 1985, and have had the good fortune to work with good people, surrounded by expensive, fancy UNIX workstations on pretty fast networks. I recently changed jobs, still work with good people but now rely on a laptop PC running windows NT and a 28.8 PPP connection to "home" in Pittsburgh as my only connection to the internet from wherever I travel to. In addition to my own little windows NT system, which I at first denied was even a computer, I have visited sites with hundreds, or thousands, of them. I am particularly interested in the problems of managing remote or roving users of windows NT systems, and whether the central administration practices that have become widely-used in the UNIX world (such as methods for software installation and configuration, error logging, and system backups) can be applied in the windows NT world.
JAN SANISLO
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Washington 353250
Seattle, WA 98195
Phone: 206-685-0911
FAX: 206-543-2969
oystr@maui.cs.washington.edu
Our departmental computing environment has been oriented around UNIX. We are now substantially increasing the number of Windows NT machines in use. The major concerns we have are:
1) Choosing the right level and method of integrating NT and UNIX environments so that we have the best of both worlds.
2) Defining and implementing procedures and tools for minimizing the support overhead traditionally associated with "personal
3) Selecting the appropriate distribution of functionality between UNIX and NT, e.g. mail, printing and filing services.
PHIL SCARR
Synopsys, Inc.
700 E. Middlefield Road, Mailstop C-1-1
Mountain View, CA 94143
prscarr@synopsys.com
Synopsys is a company which makes software for the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) market. Our customers are big silicon manufacturers (NEC, Sony, Texas Instruments, Intel, etc.). The market has traditionally been dominated by UNIX workstations (Sun and HP mostly). But this is changing and our customers are clamoring for NT versions of the Synopsys tools.
Synopsys is working on the migration of it's UNIX software to NT as a new project. Some of the problems we're anticipating/experiencing:
1. How do you teach 300+ UNIX developers to use NT?
2. How do you get Atria ClearCase working under NT?
3. What do you do about UNIX/NT integration?
4. How do you migrate everyone else from Macintosh to NT?
5. How do you support 1200 PCs?
GARY SEEHOUSZ
Raytheon E-Systems
800 International Dr
Linthicum, Md. 21090
gwseeho@alpha.ncsc.mil
Phone: 410-850-7890
My current emphasis on NT is in managing the integration of NT machines into a homogeneous Sun-UNIX environment. The organizations that I support have two levels of NT integration. The first is primarily a standalone NT network which has little interaction with the UNIX nets. The second is a full integration of NT machines, to be used for typical office automation tasks, into a Sun client-server architecture.
The first environment efforts to date have primarily been coming up to speed on installing Windows NT workstation and server. Very little has been done with changing systems default settings for security and performance. This needs to be addressed. The second environment is concerned with mail, data, and application inter-operability. Mail is planned to be handled with Microsoft Exchange. Data will be served by NFS file servers that purport to serve NFS and NTFS/CIFS natively. This has not been tested as yet. Application interchange is still an unsolved issues. There are few utilities that I've seen to do the conversion from our UNIX products to Microsoft products.
Another large area of concern is system management for the NT boxes. I have seen quite a few products that claim to do this but we haven't seriously looked at any yet.
DEREK SIMMEL
ds@cert.org
Security Improvement Team
Networked Systems Survivability Program
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
4500 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
(412) 268-6238
https://www.cert.org
https://www.sei.cmu.edu
The Networked Systems Survivability (NSS) Program of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is home to the CERT(R) Coordination Center. In addition to incident handling activities and security information services, the NSS Program includes teams dedicated to research and development of security improvement tools and techniques, survivable network technologies, incident and vulnerability analysis, and systems for collaborative security analysis.
Many system and network administrators familiar with large scale UNIX and other types of networked system deployments are faced with translating their existing knowledge and experience into terms and practices applicable to the NT networking environments. Although many common system and network security issues are directly applicable in environments incorporating NT, those unique to such environments are not yet well understood. In addition, it is not clear what new security implications emerge relative to the scale to which NT network environments are deployed.
The Security Improvement Team is currently engaged in the definition, research and development of recommended system and network administration practices, and information security evaluation procedures and tools. Our goal is to provide pragmatic guidance to organizations regarding secure deployment and operation of their systems and networks. Implementation platforms of interest include popular UNIX variants and Windows NT. Among the most difficult areas we are attempting to address is the development of security practices that are readily scalable to meet the needs of large organizations.
Our team is particularly interested in learning from the experiences of system and network administrators who are currently deploying and managing large scale systems and networks that incorporate Windows NT Server, Workstation, and related products. We also hope to cultivate collaborative relationships with individuals and organizations using NT in the field, developers producing security solutions for NT environments, and researchers investigating security issues associated with systems and networks incorporating NT.
The Software Engineering Institute is sponsored by the United States Department of Defense.
BRYAN STANSELL
GNAC, Inc.
2600 Campus Drive
Suite 275
San Mateo, CA 94403
bryan@gnac.com
Phone: 415-655-7706
Fax: 415-655-7751
The biggest problem I'm trying to tackle is the integration issues of NT and UNIX. Things such as NFS vs. CIFS, NIS vs. NT user management, and printing. Multi-protocol filers such as Network Appliance boxes and Samba on UNIX hosts have helped tremendously. I heard of but haven't seen (in action) any tools that truly integrate the two sides. I haven't even heard of any folks that use such tools.
My brain is full of questions on not only how to create, scale, and administer an NT site by itself, but also how to integrate it into existing UNIX infrastructures. Unfortunately that leaves no room for solutions. :-( Hopefully I'll find some?
CHUCK SUNDERMEIER
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Information Services
29 WSEC
Lincoln, NE 68588-0657
(402) 472-5434
(404) 472-5642 (FAX)
csundermeier1@unl.edu
The University is in the initial stages of deploying Lotus Notes system-wide, on an NT platform. We have the potential of 65,000-70,000 Notes users within three years when the system is fully deployed. At this point, we do not have much experience supporting and maintaining an NT environment, and looking at alternatives for implementing/maintaining an NT infrastructure.
AXEL TANNER
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
axs@zurich.ibm.com
Postal address: Saumerstr. 4
CH-8803 Rueschlikon
Switzerland
Phone: +41/1/724 82 49
FAX: +41/1/724 89 59
Our site is traditionally strong on UNIX, with a complete 'Single System Image' (centrally managed, dataless client machines, user data and applications on AFS fileservers) and a range of users from secretaries, who need a stable machine with the necessary desktop applications, to computer scientists, who have to have full control over their machines, and everything in between. During the last years many users requested and got PCs on their desk with various operating systems like OS/2, Windows 3.x/95. The ability to centrally manage these machines was lost, the users are able to and do break their machines, upgrade of software is a headache etc.
Since some time we are looking into the possibility to gain some central management, administration and security for PCs back with the help of Windows NT. My main interest is to give a similarly stable service for PCs like for the UNIX machines (as far as possible), centrally manageable, maybe even with a 'Single System Image', but to keep the Windows NT infrastructure small, using as many of the background server tasks as possible on UNIX machines. Part of this goal is also a sound security setup/policy, and a solution for the central management of PC installed software. All of this should finally make the IS managed NT offering the more attractive alternative (as opposed to the users doing things themselves), so that our users need not to be forced into it, but will take it as a relief.
R. LINDSAY TODD
Senior Systems Programmer
Dept. SSS / Bldg. VCC
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180-3590
Phone: 518-276-2605
FAX: 518-276-2809
toddr@rpi.edu
WWW: https://www.rpi.edu/~toddr
Rensselaer provides a wide range of computing services on a network of UNIX systems (mainly AIX, Irix, and Solaris). With the proliferation of Wintel systems, we are now investigating the use of Windows NT for many of these services.
In conjunction with current plans to migrate our AFS environment to DCE/DFS, we will be attempting to also integrate WNT. Our hope is to somehow support single sign-on from all platforms, access to a common file system, and secure access to all of our current services.
We are also evaluating WNT servers for certain network services. In particular, we are intensely interested in better Mail, Usenet News, and WWW servers, and if WNT solutions are superior to UNIX-based solutions, then our server platforms are likely to change. We are also evaluating whether or not Wintel systems would be a suitable platform for Numerically Intensive Computing (NIC).
CURTIS VARNER
Manager of Technical Services
University of California, Riverside
Computer Science Department
Riverside, California 92521-0304
cvarner@cs.ucr.edu
https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~cvarner
909-787-3803
The Department of Computer Science currently uses Windows NT and Microsoft development products for the introductory computer science classes. In addition, we provide a service class for the business school, in which students use Microsoft Office in the labs. These classes represent about 600 new accounts which have to be created/registered/destroyed every quarter. When this is combined with the non-freshman computer science majors, this is quite a problem. Most of the other classes use Linux as the platform, so all our accounts have to be accessible from either system. Our primary problems are administrative ones, as once the accounts are created they are generally not very trouble prone.
Our goal is to provide accounts and account information about any account on any system. So far, all we have done is to write a very limited NIS-NT password gateway, allowing users changing their passwords under Linux to propagate those changes to their NT account. Installing systems, and locking them down so their configurations are not modified has also been a real problem issue. We've experimented with using 'dd' to install NT on similar machines, and it works well. As for the software installation and the lockdown, hopefully ZAW and SMS will provide better solutions.
J.A. VERDOES
Shell International Exploration and Production BV
P.O. BOX 60
2280 AB Rijswijk
The Netherlands
j.a.verdoes@siep.shell.com
fax +31-70-3113110
Shell International Exploration and Production (SIEP) has in the past years developed a infrastructure consisting of about 1500 PC desktops, and 500+ UNIX systems.
The majority of the PCs run Windows 3.11 in server Novell server environment, newer Win95 and WinNT are now being deployed in significant numbers. SIEP's current strategy for PC desktops is Windows NT with a Shell harmonized suite of products and tools.
The UNIX systems have typically been used for running technical applications, but the nature of NT (and the ever increasing power of the systems on which NT run) is necessitating a strong integration with the two environments. The company is spread over a number of geographically separated sites.
Scalability of issues like:
- the file and name space,
- backup,
- common application start-up,
- installation, maintenance and upgrades of many often very different
applications next to each other.
- security
- system administration delegation
- printing and plotting systems
- charge back accounting
- system monitoring, capacity planning and performance management.
- obsolescence of applications, systems and protocols
- messaging to users
- regular system maintenance
- 24*7 services
have as yet not been well understood for NT.
We nevertheless need to provide a workable solution for all of these areas in the very near future.
FRED VIDEON
Univ. of Washington
Box 352350, Dept. of CS&E
Univ. of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
Phone: 206-543-4725
FAX: 206-543-2969
fred@cs.washington.edu
Myself and several other system administrators are responsible for a computing installation which is rapidly shifting from UNIX to Windows NT. We've seen the number of NT system increase from zero to over 400 in approximately two years. We expect this movement to NT to continue at approximately this pace for at least the next two years. As a top ten ranked Computer Science Department, we work in an environment in which heterogeneity has traditionally been considered an asset, and the boundaries of computing are put to the test on a regular basis. Thus, our particular challenges:
1. Cross platform integration. We have research and instruction dependent upon a wide variety of different types of systems. We need to provide a high degree of integration for NT users.
2. System management costs per system. Since we have had so many systems arrive so quickly, and since we have such limited staff, we've had to work very hard at automating as much of the system management as possible.
JOHN I-CHUNG WANG
University of Houston
Hoffman Hall
Room 501
4800 Calhoun
Houston, TX 77204-3475Hello
jwang@cs.uh.edu
obkb@juno.com
Essentially there are two roles that NT is likely to play at this site.
The first is that courses involving low level system oriented programming is best down on machines that are intrinsically independent and are not likely to interfere with the network in general. Initially, such courses were taught (last semester before I was hired on) on Win95 but access controls were too liberal on those machines causing frequent reloads after various games had played havoc with the configurations (games loaded by students after hours). Hence a decision was taken to pursue NT workstation as a means of limiting student alteration of lab resources (personally, I would've and will pursue the streamlining of automated re-installation of the desired environment).
The second role is merely the fact that certain functions are better performed cost wise by personal computers versus workstations and faculty will be bringing in PC's whether we like it or not. Also the administrative office needs to transition off their now obsolete Mac basis and sadly, Windows appears to be the logical choice. Integration of services and remedial configuration support can be and should be provided by the general UNIX networked environment.
DAVID WEBB
Georgia Institute of Technology,
School of ECE
777 Atlantic Dr
Atlanta, GA 30332
dwebb@ee.gatech.edu
(404)894-2905
Fax (404)894-4641
We are trying to incorporate Windows NT academic labs and research NT machines into a UNIX based support structure. We need to figure out the best way to provide login, backup, application and helpdesk support. We are at the beginning of this "incorporation" and are trying to figure out the best and easiest way of accomplishing these goals.
JEFF WELTY
weltyj@wdni.com
Biometric Support Engineer, Timberlands R&D
WTC-1A3
Weyerhaeuser Company
Tacoma, WA 98422
Ph 206-924-6390
Fax 206-924-6376
I work at a research site, with about 30 people directly on site. We are slowly migrating to NT on the desktop (currently have 7 stations) and will be phasing all desktops to NT. We work with research grade data that has legal requirements which prohibit its access to any company units other than our own. The company network spans the nation, and is considered to be untrustworthy.
So: 1) We are struggling with keeping the data secure on networked PC's running NT workstation. Interim solutions for sharing data have been running things like SAMBA on UNIX boxes to limit access and allow us to know what's in the "crystal clear" box as opposed to the black box that NT is. 2). We are searching for methods to administer larger numbers of PC's as we continue to upgrade more desktops. This is focused on reliable methods, such as automated scripts etc, rather than manual tasks which encompass human error.
GARY WHITE
ARCO Exploration & Production Technology
2300 W Plano Parkway
Plano, Texas 75075
gwhite@arco.com
(972) 509-6554
ARCO is investigating how to accommodate a world of NT on the desktops of at least the technical professionals, if not everybody. With a global company network which has historically supported file sharing and application access with UNIX systems, Macintosh and Novell networks, we are considering naming and organizational plans for doing the same with NT.
TODD WILLIAMS
MacNeal-Schwendler Corp.
815 Colorado Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90041
todd.williams@macsch.com
(213) 259-4973
(213) 259-3838 [FAX]
I am a technical manager with 15 years UNIX System Administration experience. About 5-10 years ago, this site migrated from VMS to UNIX as their main internal platform. In the last 5 years, the number of PCs has steadily increased, and recently the Macs have almost been phased out. Windows NT 4.0 is becoming a very popular platform for the desktop, but has not yet proven itself to be reliable enough as a server platform.
I have recently been given the responsibility for PCs and Macs in addition to the UNIX environment. I am interested in integrating the two in a user-friendly and cost-effective way. Our main problems are NT server reliability/robustness and the immaturity of solutions to handle emerging standard protocols like DHCP. We are always looking for corporate standard solutions that handle PCs, Macs, and UNIX, and that are scalable to large corporate sites plus small field offices over a 56kbps WAN.
LAWRENCE WOESTMAN
Hewlett Packard
1000 NE Circle Blvd. 524A
Corvallis OR 97330
larry@cv.hp.com
We are developing the same products for UNIX and NT. Our primary issues are interoperability between HP-UX and NT.
WALTER WONG
Computing Services
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh PA 15213
Phone: 412-268-8514
FAX: 412-268-4987
wcw+@CMU.EDU
Unfortunately, more questions than answers at this time...
a) Scaling in a 'hostile' environment - How do we scale NT to 15K+ active users in a single domain? 4K+ machines? How do we keep misconfigured machines from taking down entire components or keep machines from booting (say a rouge bootp server?) How do we ensure users can share information properly without compromising their security (no, we can't firewall the students from the rest of the university...)
b) Software administration (including configuration and release management) - If I toast my system disk, how do I get everything back exactly the way I had it without a great deal of effort (before and after the toasting occurs)? How do I distribute and configure software to all that want it (and are actually licensed for it) with minimal user interaction? How do I 'back out' of that release? How can we centrally manage the machines and yet allow local customizations to those authorized to do so? How do I just boot a brand new machine off the network, wait, and have a fully functional machine when it completes?
Another question is how do we get across to developers that this is not a 'personal computer' OS? Specifically, the person sitting down in front of the machine may not have (nor want to have) full administrative access on the machine. For example, this means that as a programmer you can no longer assume you can write anywhere you want on the disk.
VORADESH YENBUT
Computer Science & Engineering
BOX 352350, U of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-2350
Phone: +1 206 685-0912
FAX: +1 206 543-2969
yenbut@cs.washington.edu
Windows NT has widespreaded in our department after a number of years of UNIX dominant. I have just started to have my hand on the Windows NT system. After attending a NT training, I have some concern for NT's robustness as a server for shared resources such as files, mails, etc. NT system seems to be hosed easily and don't seem to do well for multiple services on a single machine.
One of my primary jobs is to take care of mails on UNIX systems. We have seen mails from Windows platforms with special attachments such as word documents. People have an impression that they need to read mail on NTs in order to read those documents. I wonder if there is a way to integrate NT to UNIX system for UNIX users to easily read those mails including attachments without the need to log on and transfer file to be read an NT system.
JASON ZIONS
Chief Scientist, Softway Systems Inc.
2519 S. Shields St., #1K-129
Fort Collins, CO 80526
jazz@softway.com
https://www.opennt.com
Development of OpenNT, a complete UNIX environment hosted on Windows NT. Areas of research include: ways to provide UNIX semantics using NT mechanisms; semantics of mixed POSIX-mode and Win32-mode processes; NT filesystems; how much admin of NT-plus-OpenNT should look like admin of NT versus admin of UNIX.
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