Stanford has approximately 38000 users from students in dorm rooms to high capacity, high volume computing occurring in the engineering and business schools. A high percentage of the backend services are run on either an IBM mainframe or, increasingly, UNIX platforms. The campus is seeing a strong shift of the desktop from Macintosh to Wintel and we are exploring the most efficient, cost effective techniques for integrating the wintel platform into our established UNIX environment. Central to that effort is an efficient process for connecting NT domain controllers to the central user account repository instead of replicating accounts as is the current method.

Additionally, Stanford relies heavily on kerberos authentication for security and runs without any firewalls between most machines and Internet connectivity. Since we don't rely on a closed Microsoft environment (NT server, exchange server, sql server, etc...) but rather connect to UNIX mail servers, UNIX databases, and centralized AFS storage, the NT user needs the capability of authenticating to these resources without unencrypted password transmission and with encryption on the wire.

I am currently involved in managing a team that provides infrastructure development for campus computing. Part of my technical management responsibility includes being involved with a campus working group that has been established to provide guidance to users involved in initial setup of department-level NT networks. This guidance includes connectivity to the campus computing environment, uniform establishment and registration of NT domains and user tips. The goal is to provide a vehicle for NT users/administrators to voluntarily ahdere to centralized recommendations and standards without threatening the autonomy currently enjoyed across the campus.

Tim Torgenrud email: torg@netserver.Stanford.EDU
Distributed Computing Group phone: (415)723-3940
Stanford University FAX: (415)725-9121