I have some thoughts about ways that we could reduce the monthly cost of doing business.  I think it might be possible to save enough money to meet our budget reversion needs without actually taking away the symbolic on-call compensation.

Hi Folks,

In instant message, Billy B. shared with me a quick summary of a meeting he had this morning with Debbie and Harry.

Billy Beaudowin: I asked for 2 names as "candidates" for the infrastructure-level/domain admin type responsibilities. I expect to start training people, and then assuming the committee rubber stamps the specific people later, like I honestly expect, I'll have had a couple weeks jump on the knowledge sharing

Erskine Bowles speaks to NCSU Staff Senate

- Thank you for your service, the university wouldn't run without you
- At 63 years old, this is the toughest economic climate he has seen
- If the General Assembly doesn't continue to fund us as in the past, we won't continue to turn out the highly educated workforce that drives the economy of NC, grave concern
- Last year, we were asked to provide budgets for 3/5/7% cuts. 75% of our costs are people. Cut other 25% by 7% and it's a 28% cut in non-people resources.

I've just modified Unity.ad to hold the attributes uidNumber, gidNumber, and uid in the global catalog, using the info from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/248717

The "global catalog" is a partial replica of the account information needed to log in to the domain, used for performace so that users don't have to chase referrals when trying to login.

These particular attributes are used by Samba, in particular the 3.3 release that we're migrating towards, in identity management between the AD domain and the posix world.

The PHP configuration on our Drupal site limits how large a file one can upload.  It turns out, we can link anything in AFS through this site, with the appropiate paths and permissions.

All of the file content on this site is stored in AFS at

/afs/unity.ncsu.edu/web/x/xteams_oit/drupal/xteams.oit.ncsu.edu.iso/files

This path maps to the URL

http://xteams.oit.ncsu.edu/iso/sites/xteams.oit.ncsu.edu.iso/files/

As you can tell by clicking on it, browsing of files is not allowed, you must know the name of the file to which you're trying to link.

We need to be sure that creating an account in an OU doesn't conflict with any current /or future/ Unity accounts. Based on this objective we want a script that will look for users/groups/computers that are not following the standard of <prefix>.<object name>. This is a requirement to prevent OU admin from coming into conflict with the naming convensions setup for Unity account creation.

I have attached a pdf with a flowchart of how the script.

I'm doing some cleanup in the UNITY domain, and am starting to collapse the "OU=Unity Computers" into OU=Organizations.

Towards this end, I've changed the container to hold unassigned workstations in Unity.ad (to OU=Computers,OU=Unassigned) and moved the existing machines into the new container.  I'm planning to leave the debris under OU=Unity Computers for a few days to make sure everything "took".

I've documented the steps to take to allow any domain user to register workstations in the domain at

http://xteams.oit.ncsu.edu/iso/node/131

Good Afternoon,

According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 R2 is scheduled for delivery during 2010. No specific date is given.

Unfortunately this excludes Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 as the first choice in operating systems for the Windows 2008 Unity Server Migration Project.

You can find this release date posted at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/roadmap.aspx

We had the first meeting of the "Active Directory Working Group" on the 28th, the agenda and notes (once approved) will be available at

http://oit.ncsu.edu/iam/active-directory-working-group

In related news, the "IAM Service Team" met on the 29th, see http://oit.ncsu.edu/iam/iam-service-team

The IAM project is one of the first projects to be addressed in OIT's Strategic Operations Plan.

Folks,

I've added the alinks module to the ISO drupal site.

This module allows one to identify text with a URL, and creates an external link to that URL whenever it displays the text.  This makes it easy to write documentation that refers to Vision with a capitol 'V" without having to remember to link it.

All authors, ISO and otherwise, can edit alinks at:

http://xteams.oit.ncsu.edu/iso/admin/build/alinks